The tar sands are rightly called one of the world’s greatest environmental crimes, as I’ve written. No company that invests in the Canadian tar sands can legitimately call itself green.

Yet BP, the oil company that lavished millions on advertising its move “Beyond Petroleum,” announced this month it’s putting $3 billion into this dirtiest of dirty fuels!

BP is buying a half-share of the ironically named Sunrise field:

“BP’s move into oil sands is an opportunity to build a strategic, material position and the huge potential of Sunrise is the ideal entry point for BP into Canadian oil sands,” said Tony Hayward, BP’s group chief executive.

The company ultimately plans to produce 200,000 barrels of oil a day from the field.

Shame on you BP!

Just how bad are the tar sands environmentally? As The Independent explains:

Read more

So the Knight Science Journalism tracker writes an article titled, “Lots of ink and perplexion: Climate happens. But what, exactly, happened at Bali?” The article’s goal is to explain that nobody knows what happened or why — by quoting different explanations from various blogs. He writes (testily):

“The US humiliation angle comes from this little AP piece, brought to our attention by Joe Romm at the rather testy Climate Progress blog. It reports that one small nation’s scolding triggered such a wave of hooting that American delegates promptly pulled in their horns.”

Testy? Testy? Testy? Who’s testy?

Seriously, I suppose it isn’t the worst of epithets, though I confess I’m shooting for snarky, not testy. Also, from a website by journalists, I’d like an explanation of why they think that, rather than just a snide aside. I would argue that for any rational human being who cares about the health and well-being of life on this planet, including ours, being “testy” is about the mildest state of mind one can reasonably have, especially given what Bush has been doing for the past seven years (muzzling climate scientists, blocking international action, and on and on).

Still I must accept the fact that I’ve been dissed by not merely one of the best science journalism tracking websites I have found, but in fact the only one I could find…. I hope that wasn’t too testy.

UPDATE: Earl Killian notes that the entire world got rather testy at Bali, thanks to the Bushies. As one eyewitness put it:

Then occurred one of the most remarkable sounds that has perhaps ever been heard in the annals of international diplomacy–like a collective global groan–descending then to a murmur, then increasing in volume to a full-throated expression of rage and anger and booing and jeering, lasting for a full minute, so that finally the Minister had to call the meeting back to order.