June 15, 2010

Live: Kate Sheppard and Grist’s David Roberts Dissect Obama’s BP Speech

Fresh from his fourth—and first overnight—trip to the Gulf, President Barack Obama will deliver his first ever Oval Office address to the nation tonight at 8pm EDT. The administration says Obama will unveil his plan to make BP compensate Gulf businesses and residents for their mounting, spill-related losses. But what else will the president say? Will he be bold and demand a price on carbon? Or will he stick with punishing BP and leave the larger energy-related issues to Congress. The suspense is killing us …

Watch the speech at 8 pm EDT. A crew of us will be right there with you, chatting away: our own Kate Sheppard, Grist’s David Roberts, Sierra Club Executive Director Mike Brune, and Josh Freed, Director of the Clean Energy Program.

 

This chat was produced by Grist as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

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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