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

Oil Tar Sands: A Dead Financial Duck?

Oil Tar Sands have many enemies already because of the high amount of energy and water used in their extraction. But if opponents of wind turbines can cite bird kills as a justification for the refusal of planning applications for wind farms, what will this story about the killing of at least 500 migrating ducks by the toxic effluent contained in the tailings lagoons do for investor and public sentiment? I wouldn't expect anyone reading this to have invested in stocks associated with this technology although many of them have done well in the market. I would be willing to bet that these dead ducks will hit a nerve in a public unmoved or unaware of any environmental costs. It will also enrage hunters, who prefer their ducks to be killed by themselves, and who are often wrongly thought to be anti-environment. This isn't true of all hunters though. I lived in Tuscany for some years, and legal hunting opening sounds like an outbreak of war.The best laugh I have had lately was reading where a group opposing wind power projects planned for southern Italy, claiming that the proposed turbines would kill migrating birds. Why was I laughing? Because southern Italian hunters and poachers are notorious for welcoming incoming migrating birds with raised barrels and trapping nets, that's why. AFP: Toxic ponds kill ducks in Canada