More succour and apologies to my reader.

I apologise to any readers who wondered why I have been silent for the last 10 months. The reason is simple: just like so many other investors I watched, paralysed by the speed of the meltdown in value of my small portfolio. Especially as selling into a losing market sometimes simply was not worth the effort. I watched as the irresponsibility of our overpaid business leaders wrecked the Irish economy and trousered loadsamoney in the process. I was roundly abused when I kept pointing out that the entire building splurge which has left so many picturesque villages and towns blighted by enormous ticky-tacky identikit and half-finished housing estates which are largely empty now, the panic which led so many to get on the property ladder was based essentially on the premise that new first-time buyers would come on board. And before long we had lenders running ads seeking to offer 125% mortgages. The entire Ponzi scheme was run by the same people we are now expected to trust to get us out of their mess. It isn't as if the banks don't have form in this area. Irish taxpayers only recently stopped paying a levy on their incomes used to to pay the debts of AIB when it screwed up in the insurance business. The same golden circle were around then too. (Don't forget that the banks lent the money to buy the field to someone who then got planning permission, and sold the land on for several times he paid for it. To some developer, who borrows the money to use the planning permission to create a new concept in rural living. The appointed builders borrow the money for the development. Some of that money was used to produce the full page ads in the ever fatter Property sections, places where 'journalists' talked up the attractions of borrowing against the value locked into your house because of the then sillly property prices. Don't forget it was bank funding which caused the current disaster) So now we have NAMA, designed to save the developers whilst lumbering the taxpayer with their bank debts. We really need to see proper professional people in charge. None should come from Ireland, because it does seem that our own locals all seem to have bought in to the neo-liberal fantasy. So the recent rise in share prices has cheered me up a bit. But just as I said earlier, I had no spare cash, because of in the collapse. The Green Capitalist is sorry that he failed to show the reader shares which have risen, albeit from levels far below those which first attracted him, and now some of the fastest-growing. I have also a blog called Wheels of Ire over at http://wheelsofire.wordpress.com where I am a bit more personal. It's also more political. If it offends anyone, well, so it goes.My opinion does matter. regardless of how stupid I am. Mind you, if you are a wing nut you will find plenty to get off on. Thank you all for your tolerance. New content coming soon as later this week.

BBC NEWS | Business | 'Green' energy spending on rise

BBC NEWS | Business | 'Green' energy spending on rise Reading this excellent piece from the Beeb I felt a strong sense of deja vu, or of an echo of something familiar. I imagine this is shared by readers who know me. About 1995 their eyes started to glaze over when I banged on about this ecological stuff. And how much potential it had. The Market has a lot of money sloshing around at the moment, as irrational behaviour of panicked investors, the coming home to roost of really dodgy behaviour by their oh-so-clever acned geniuses who have slashed stockholder value in their banks (and who remain employed), and the stock market slide has made people fearful of equity investing. Property too no longer seems a safe haven. Gold, Commodities and most other areas still have potential downsides,and folk who have just seen the value of their pension pretty much halved are wary,if not quite leery about putting their cash down. And let's not forget that institutional investors need to invest in something.

Which Is Greenest Large Cap?

Many companies are rushing to claim Green credentials,often on the thinnest of grounds. This practice is called greenwashing, and will eventually backfire on companies caught up in it,as the public sees through the bull. An example would bee recent ads for Vauxhall in which they bragged about having reduced energy use at one of their UK plants by a whopping 33%. Sounds good,even virtuous, doesn't it? But what they don't tell you is that they closed down one of the three daily shifts and laid the workers off. If they had reduced the workforce by closing down one of the remaining shifts, they would presumably have claimed a 66% saving! Spinning job losses into good green news is a new one on me. However some large caps are genuinely green. As many investors tend to head for the perceived safety of Top 100 companies at times of volatility, let me suggest GE for a green investment. This behemoth and American icon we used know as General Electric but it involved in much more than kitchen appliances,making everthing from wind turbines,desalination plants, and trains to energy-efficient lighting such as CFLs and LEDs. They built the wind turbine farm on the Arklow bank for Airtricity,the first offshore wind farm in Europe,and have a film of it on their website.http://ge.ecomagination.com/site/index.html The Appliance Division is to be sold off and this should benefit stockholders.If this should happen somewhere between 5 and 8 Billion dollars would be realised,according to the Wall Street Journal. GE also pays a dividend 4 times a year, and yields a useful 3.87%. The stock price is down 12% y-o-y, and should recover over the medium term. And when the dollar eventually recovers we may see we got these cheaply. BBC NEWS | Business | GE strikes $2bn wind turbine deal

Personal Transport and Possible Pneumatic Profits.

Transport accounts for much more energy use than than all the power we consume in our homes. Many miserable commuters spend more and more of their time alone in their cars,commuting from homes bought further and from jobs, homes bought in a desperate attempt to get a claw hold on the very bottom rung on the housing ladder, crawling along on severely congested roads. And now with petrol,oil, gas and electricity bills all rising, their misery is increasing. All Greens denounce all these single occupant cars, and more should be done for car pooling and public transport. This is all well and good, but offers little hope for the depressed commuter. During our fat years billions were spent on our road network, and not nearly enough on public transport. And we managed to demonstrate another proof of the theory that roads soon fill with traffic. But let's face some reality here: we won't get commuters out of their cars until we offer a decent and comfortable alternative.Certainly, many would prefer to have an extra hour in bed and be able to catch a fast,comfortable and guaranteed train, on which they can doze, work,or whatever they wish, in a comfortable seat.With one carriage for anyone wanting to use their mobile phones. Building new railways takes an absurd amount of time in this country, but if we can put a motorway through Tara then we can build railways anywhere we want too,or so I would imagine.And the Rail Procurement Agency must by now have built up a level of expertise,and this would help a lot in contract negotiations. And even if we manage to get our public transport infrastructure to line up with where we live, and build fast links to where we work we will only have solved part of the problem. The sense of private personal space we get from our car-ownership,too, is an important issue, and not one that I can do justice to here.However all transport policies seem to forget about country people,who rely on their cars,and who feel unfairly hit by policies designed to encourage/punish urban motorists out of cars. The cost of transport is considerably more than the cost of the electricity we use in this country. And with oil prices rising for the the foreseeable future we need a solution. A solution offering all that the car offers, but at a lower cost. What have we got? We have hybrids and electric vehicles emerging and I will write about them again. We have battery companies getting huge backing to develop better batteries. But their is one technology which seems to have been overlooked. Air power. Or being more accurate, compressed air piston engines. And like buses, at least two engines have been developed to a stage where the private small investor might get a look-in at an IPO. There's a bunch of video of these these two companies showing off real working vehicles on YouTube . Since these vehicles can fill up anywhere there is a compressor refuelling will not be a problem. And they certainly qualify as low emission vehicles,as they only emit air. Even allowing for the fuel used by the compressor.

I understand that Motor Development International (MDI) the Company behind the Air Car has done deals with a number of major firms such as Tata, the Indian family-controlled conglomerate also in the news because of having bought Jaguar and Land Rover. Two British icons being bought by a company from a country which used be a British colony seems a delicious irony. I apologise to any readers still with me down here for the length of this post. Fear not,there's more to come. But in the next post. I also think the Australian air-powered engine is a beautiful piece of sculpture worthy of a place in any gallery.

Darwen drives for growth.

It has been a long time since I did my duty by my blog. So I apologise to my reader. Sorry, Mammy. Since my last posting a lot, has happened in the markets,and most of it has been bad. But for those involved in investing in Green ventures it has not been bad. In fact,it has been pretty good. Solar PV has romped ahead, huge amounts of money have been poured into Alternative Energy start-ups and into existing companies. I wrote about Tanfield before,and I hold a small amount of shares in the company. Some would have taken profit when it hit the heights,but I didn't, as I prefer to buy and hold. So now I have come across another venture run by the entrepreneur who built up Tanfield. The new company is Darwen,and it makes buses and coaches. It also has Roy Stanley as owner of half the shares. He's the man credited with building the success story of Tanfield,the zero-emissions vehicles builder which has achieved such success already. Tanfield have developed vans and light trucks running on electricity and which are ideally suited for City deliveries. These vehicles have a decent range,with 200km between charges,and 80 kmh top speed. Now this man has bought an ailing bus and coach-builder which has a long history and culture. East Lancashire Coachbuilders was also going bust. He has added other elements to the business ,including LPD. See for yourself at http://www.darwengroup.com/products.html The Green Capitalist wasn't able to buy these shares when I first came across them last week, when they were around 38p. They have jumped to 48p in the last few days on the back of announcing a new £5m 38 bus order. What is a bus-builder doing in this blog? Well,it is simple really. The more people can be encouraged to use public transport the better. And the British Government is investing in public transport which is good for Darwen. Not only this:as concern about climate change grows,so will demand for buses. Add to this the commitment to develop hybrid buses together with the experience of electric vehicle drive-trains brought from Tanfield. Now, many companies are looking a hybrid solution,but few have the resources to put the entire package together. So I reckon these are worth watching. I'm not qualified to give financial advice but if I could risk €1000 or so, I'd certainly buy Darwen.