December 3, 2012

Live: Can Obama—and Congress—Fix Climate Change?

At the third Climate Desk Live event, a panel of experts weighs lawmakers’ next best moves on global warming.

This morning, the third Climate Desk Live briefing will consider a question on many minds: What can we reasonably expect to happen on climate change in the next four years, given the current political state of affairs?

The event, which I am hosting, features a leading member of Congress on the climate issue: Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Markey is not only the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, he’s also author of the only climate legislation to pass a chamber of Congress—the Waxman-Markey bill.

In addition to Markey, we’ll have a panel of expert commentators weighing the president’s options—and what can be accomplished by the executive branch. They are:

  • Eric Pooley, author of The Climate War and senior vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund. For some of Pooley’s thoughts on Obama’s climate options, see here.
  • Vicki Arroyo, director of the Georgetown Climate Center. For Arroyo’s popular TED Talk on adapting to climate change, see here.
  • Bill Becker, director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, which has just released its 2012 Presidential Climate Action Plan.

Live stream of the event starts at 9:30 a.m. EST today. Watch it here: 

 

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

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 can’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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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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