Presidential Hopefuls: the sequel

• The Lazy Environmentalist: Some bloggers are simply not going to have political coverage or candidate endorsements on their websites. That is one of the risks I ran when I decided to choose a set of environmental blogs with different niche markets and viewpoints, rather than focusing on blogs that offer a specific sort of coverage. The Lazy Environmentalist is the first blog I have profiled that has a paucity of politically-related posts on its website. In no way does that detract from the quality of the blog; politics is just an area that Josh Dorfman decided not to write about on his website. However, that doesn't mean Dorfman has been completely silent on the topic. Here's a link to an interview where Dorfman speaks out about the sort of action he expects from our political leaders on global warming. It's a long interview, and that particular segment is towards the bottom, under the question "What would you say to the folks that still believe global warming is just a myth." Also, it is my understanding that Dorfman expects our culture's switch to "green" initiatives will be mostly consumer-driven, rather than the result of any top-down governmental policies. If you don't believe me, then check out this quote from that same interview: "With our business, profits and environmental change are directly aligned with each other because the more our business grows the more positive environmental change we effect by virtue of what we’re selling. If our products and services weren’t better for the environment than the conventional choices available today, I’d shut down the business and go work for someone else. The entire point of what we’re doing is to demonstrate that business can be an extremely viable and powerful tool for change."

• Dot Earth: Andrew Revkin has also maintained a degree of practiced "journalist's neutrality" in his New York Times environmental blog. Like Grist and TreeHugger, he has posted a summary of each candidate's position on the environment, but he never delves into any sort of commentary or interpretation.
  

• Green Options: Like Dot Earth, GO has refrained from making any overt political statements. In all cases, I am very hesitant on making predictions concerning a blog's political stance without any direct information, but here, I think the blog's clear aversion to "clean coal", its skepticism towards ethanol, and their heady support (read the last paragraph of that article) for a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions most closely aligns the blog with the platform of John Edwards, where the environment is concerned. This conclusion is based solely on issues-analysis, however, and without an direct statements by any of the blog's writers, I could be mistaken.

• New Scientist: I found more 2008 presidential race-related articles on New Scientist's homepage, rather than their environmental blog. After I read this article, I got the feeling that New Scientist isn't a big fan of Mike Huckabee, since he is officially a creationist. But that is neither here nor now in the environmental debate. Other than that, there is little on the website that is indicative of the magazine's bias, which is to be expected, since it is an international science magazine.

• Real Climate: Real Climate's blog has avowed that it will refrain from making any political statements in its articles. Because of the blog's decidedly apolitical stance, I had difficulty finding anything related to the 2008 presidential race.

• Eco-Street: The writers of Eco-Street, a green-lifestyle British blog, also had precious little to say about the U.S. elections. Sorry, not much to say here.

• De Smog Blog: Now, here's an interesting little blog. On January 4th, the blog awarded Barack Obama its controversial "SmogMaker" award, for "Blowing smoke on global warming." Since then it's retracted its statement, saying that, since Obama was far from the worst offender on their list, they "hoped his nomination might shock people to attention" because the media and the candidates have mostly ignored the topic. While it's true that the presidential elections have, for the most part, avoided talking about global warming (only 24 out of 2,275 debate questions have touched on the topic), the blog stirred up some controversy with its choice. That said, it's clear the blog is no big fan of Obama; here they accused him of "spin." Actually, while the blog had some good things to say about Edwards and Clinton, they seem to be upholding the position of "conscientious objector"; in this article, they state that they believe the issue of environmentalism has become too partisan, when in reality global warming should be a discussion "about science, about risk, about prudent government policy." Some very interesting arguments...