Climate Change Back on the Agenda?

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After months of obsessing over health care, President Barack Obama could give the climate debate a much-needed shot in the arm this week. Tomorrow he’ll speak at the United Nations’ Climate Summit in New York, a test run in advance of the Copenhagen conference in December. While Majority Leader Harry Reid has signaled that the Senate may not take up climate legislation until next year, Obama’s unofficial “green cabinet” has been quietly lobbying senators behind the scenes to assure them that the climate bill is viewed as a priority by the administration, the Washington Times reports. But the real test of Obama’s climate commitment will come later in the week when he addresses the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. Though the climate isn’t officially on the agenda there, watch how Obama does or doesn’t talk up green jobs and a carbon market to get an idea of how fast he wants to move on cap and trade.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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