Green Blogs List

What is a Green Blog?

There is no clear line between blogs and many other web-based information channels. Many lists of "blogs" on the web include a lot of sites that are not blogs in any useful sense of the word. So here is a new, focused list of green blogs.

It does not include sites that are purely news channels or the web presences of news or trade magazines. It emphasizes blogs that are not commercial projects with paid staff. It also emphasizes blogs with information of interest to businesses, so it is light on lifestyle blogs.

That said, here is my subjective list of the green blogs (in English) that are most worth reading. I follow many of these for Daily Green Brief.

Please use the comment panel below to add your suggestions, complaints and corrections.

List of Green Blogs

Blog	Comments
Autoblog Green	Cars
businessGreen blog
Cleantech Blog
CleanTechies blog	Part of the CleanTechies portal
CleanTechnica	Part of the Important Media network
Climate Progress	Politics; a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund
Coal Tattoo	Coal
Daily Green Brief
Doc's Green Blog	With bay area events list
Eco-Libris blog	Eco-Libris greens the publishing industry
EcoGeek	Apps and hardware
George Monbiot's blog	Carried in The Guardian
GigaOM Cleantech	Formerly earth2tech
Green Building Elements	Part of the Important Media network
Green Prophet	Middle East
Greenspace blog	Part of the Los Angeles Times
Grist
Guardian Environment blog	Part of The Guardian
Huffington Post green blog
ICIS Green Chemicals	Chemicals industry
Idaho Samizdat: Nuke Notes	Nuclear
Inhabitat	Green design
Marc Gunther's blog
Mongabay	Tropical forests, conservation, and wildlife
New York Times Dot Earth blog	Part of the New York Times opinion section; Andrew Revkin's column
New York Times Green blog	Part of The New York Times science section
One Block Off The Grid Blog	Solar; 1BOG is a solar group purchasing site
Planetsave	Part of the Important Media network
RealClimate	Science
RenewableEnergyWorld blog
Reuters Environment blog	Part of Thompson Reuters
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog
SolveClimate	Blog and news aggregator
sustainablog
Switchboard	Staff blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council
The Oil Drum	Fossil fuels
The Wonk Room -- Climate	Politics; a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund
TriplePundit	Both blog-type posts and items by staff writers
Watts Up With That?	"green" climate skeptic
Worldchanging
Yale Environment 360	"a publication of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies"

The World of Green Blogs

Blogs come in many flavors.

• Some are personal, independent projects (like this one).
• Some are still personal, but have sponsors. An example is Joseph Romm's Climate Progress, a project of The Center for American Progress Action Fund. 
• Some that were started as blogs have become elaborate corporate web portals, like Treehugger, owned by Discovery Communications.
• Others, while part of corporate web systems, have maintained their informal, lightly edited, community-oriented blog character, such as Autoblog Green, which is owned by AOL Inc. 
• Many "blogs" are run by mainstream media companies such as The New York Times or The Guardian. They are more like columns than blogs. Nonetheless I have included some of them in the list.
• Some have grown from personal into entrepreneurial enterprises as their proprietors struggle to find ways to make them pay.
• Some are aggregators, like Matter Network, an "alliance of web publishers".

One factor that helps distinguish a blog from a news site or commercial site is its rights policy. I look for a Creative Commons license rather than an "all rights reserved" copyright. Also, a blog should ideally have an identifiable author or group of regular authors. I am consciously excluding the many commercial news sites that are sometimes seen in lists of blogs, such as Environmental Leader and Biofuels Digest.

Green Blog Directories

There are several directories of green blogs, but of varying quality.

• technorati has a separate green directory where blogs are ranked automatically using the site's "authority" metric. There are a lot of non-blogs in the list, and some quality blogs have inexplicably low scores (e.g. George Monbiot with a green score of 116). But in general the blogs are ranked in a way that seems to correspond to their real value.
• Alternative Energy News maintains the Energy Planet renewable energy directory. It has all sorts of green sites, not just blogs.
• Green Blog List exists, but its search function doesn't seem to work.
• Best Green Blogs seems no longer to be accepting free listings. Many top blogs not listed (e.g. Autoblog Green).
• The Open Directory Project, and the directories based on it, and many other directories, don't have a home for green. Green blogs are widely scattered. For instance Grist is under "Science: Environment: News and Media" while George Monbiot's blog is under "Regional: Europe: United Kingdom: News and Media: Journalists" and Climate Progress is under "Society: Issues: Environment: Climate Change". Many of the blogs in my list do not appear in dmoz at all. This is why I thought this list would be useful.

Again, I encourage and appreciate your comments.

(By the way, check out the ongoing Green Business Blog Carnival fostered by Sustainablog and the team at Triple Pundit.)

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Other blogs of interest:
environmentalresearchweb blog
GreenBiz blogs