What Environmental Problem? Oh, you must mean our foreign oil security problem...

I chose to look at the environmental policies of Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. Clinton seems to fit pretty nicely into the institutionalist category. Her website acknowledges many of the environmental challenges that we face today, including climate change and energy efficiency, and her plan includes mostly research and regulations. Its a 'yes, we have a problem, but we're not lost and we can start fixing our problems through government regulations and research' stance and I see that as a very 'institutional' approach. Now, Romney on the other hand is a bit harder to classify. He's seems to be largely unaware that this country and the world are facing environmental problems at all. He's in favor of increased energy efficiency and energy research, but not so much to deter global warming and climate change, more so that America is no longer dependent on foreign oil. He's not combating environmental disaster, he's combating Putin and Chavez. Being as all of these categories are for those who at least acknowledge that we are facing environmental damages that are human induced and need to be adressed, its hard to fit Romney into any of these categories. If forced I would label him as a market liberal. He seems to believe in some sort of natural flow taking care of this problem, he is focusing on increasing American growth (thought not terribly concerned with getting off of oil, just drilling our own) and research into new forms of energy. Its still not a neat fit, but he doesn't fit at all into any of the other categories.

I don't really see these categories as being all that helpful for categorizing candidates. The categories make sense and definitley have there uses, but it doesn't really make the candidate's policies any clearer for me personally. However, I can see how some might find these categories useful to simplify the candidates views and organize them in their mind.

Of Clinton and Romney I think its very clear that Clinton has a better policy plan. First of all because she acknowledges the problem and I believe the institutional approach is a very reasonable one. Governments are going to have to get increasingly involved and providing regulations, research funding and commitments is a far more reasonable start than Romney's plan of 'there's some kind of energy crisis going on, so we should drill up our own nature, and cause more problems, to find more oil so that we don't need Russia and the Middle East anymore'. Romeny has a energy plan, not an environmental plan, and a bad one at that, so in this case Clinton definitley has the better policy for adressing environmental issues.