Presidential Hopefuls

In light of the Yale University survey which stated that 40% of Americans believe a candidate’s position on global warming will strongly affect how they vote in 2008, I decided that a good place to begin with my blog issues analysis would be with the presidential candidates. I’ve reviewed a lot of the material on the blogs, and am making this a two-part post, simply because there is so much to say, and I don’t want to talk your ears off. In reality, though, it seems like there is somewhat of a bipartisan uproar going on over environmental policy-making. Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger have done a good job of injecting green topics into the political debate, and it seems like no candidate has been immune to environmental critiques and questions.

Also, after thoroughly looking through Eco-Worrier, I've decided the blog isn't quite what I'm looking for with my research blogs. Its content is interesting, but doesn't fit the purpose of this project. I'll be replacing it with Worldchanging, and editing my posts to reflect that change. Sorry; like I said, this is a work in progress.

• TreeHugger: TreeHugger's writers have their sights focused primarily on Senator Barack Obama. Of all the candidates, Bill Richardson (who recently dropped out of the race) appears in the most articles, but mostly because of his controversial statements concerning water supplies. Obama's name appears the second-most frequently on the website. A quick word search for "Barack Obama" turns up 24 related articles, with Hilary Clinton following closely with 22 results. As demonstrated by in Bill Richardson's case, quantity isn't necessarily an accurate measuring stick, so I read through a large portion of the articles. It turns out that TreeHugger has it's fair share of reservations concerning Obama. Chiefly, that as a senator from Illinois, Obama has, in the past, made endorsements for the coal industry. You can check out their gripes against him in this article. On the other hand, TreeHugger has done a lot of reporting on Obama's detailed environmental plan, and they seem to cautiously support him. This Obama-related article seems to reflect those sentiments. To be fair, the website also has a helpful summary of each presidential hopeful's postion.

• EcoGeek: Now, EcoGeek is, for the most part, a tech website, which means that its coverage of the 2008 presidential candidates isn't going to be as impressive as TreeHugger's myriad articles. However, I did manage to turn up several posts from the EcoGeek author, Hank Green, concerning the political race. Though this article is tangentially related to the candidacy, from what I can tell he is leaning towards either Barack Obama or John Edwards. At any rate, he calls both of their fuel economy standard plans hopeful in the article, though he expresses a lot of concern with Obama's clean coal ties in this post. Judging from this old post from December, 2006, the man Green really would've liked to see run for the presidency was Al Gore. Too bad Gore eschewed the 2008 campaign.
• Worldchanging: It took me a while to find it, but I think this statement by Alex Steffen, the creator/executive editor of Worldchanging, sums up Worldchanging's political endorsements quite nicely. Granted, the post is now 3 1/2 years old, but I couldn't find anything newer on the website to contradict it.
• Grist: I have to give Grist credit, they have an easily-accessible sidebar on their homepage where you can access information on a spreadsheet about each candidate's political platform. Also, kudos to Grist for having a ridiculous amount of information about the candidates. A quick wordsearch on the website for "John Edwards" returned 139 article results for Democratic candidate, while Obama and Hillary had, respectively, 129 and 126 hits on the blog. As to be expected on an environmental blog, the Republican candidates, for the most part, weren't as well-represented. For example, a search for "Rudy Giuliani" brought back 27 results, including this scathing article that accuses him of being bought by the energy lobby. John McCain was the only stand-out Republican contender; he had a whopping 168 articles to his name. Like I noted previously, these numbers aren't necessarily indicative of, well, anything, which is why you have to dig into the content. In this case, it looks like Grist's collection of writers and contributors are leaning towards either Barack Obama or John Edwards. In Obama's case, the website has been tracking his ascent since 2004 with a great degree of optimism. If you doubt me, then check out this article from way back in 2004. They also complimented Obama's recent energy proposal as "excellent." Grist also lauded Edwards' decision to run a "carbon-neutral" campaign in mid-March of last year. Hillary, unfortunately, took a hit for her support of tire-burning in upstate New York, and her flip-flop on ethanol production. Grist also complimented McCain for being "the only presidential candidate in the Republican field to take the climate change issue seriously" but noted that the GOP is still far from "accepting the sort of legislation that will be necessary very, very soon if the problem is to be addressed adequately."