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Dear Oprah,

I just don't know where to begin. 

I can't find my words because I respect you so much. You're a woman pioneer who has done much to advance the status of women globally. You've donated millions of dollars to various organizations, and have used your talk show to raise the profile of women's issues. Your philanthropy has funded projects like The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, and Women for Women International. You've also used your celebrity to raise awareness of environmental causes, notably the efforts to rebuild the Gulf. 

That's why I'm so stumped right now by your choice to feature ads from EthicalOil.org on your television network. 

I'm all about the work that you do, but the logic of promoting tar sands oil by appealing to our desire for women's liberation, our desire to help protect women in despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia, is deeply flawed and misguided. 

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Anyone looking to understand the intricacies and implications of the Copenhagen climate summit would be well advised to start with David Corn’s introduction on MotherJones.com.

These meetings are generally filled with two kinds of people:

1. professional bureaucrats and NGO hangers-on who are so steeped in the process that they seem to speak a foreign and completely unintelligible language; and

2. Climate dilettantes who drop in to these events infrequently and struggle to understand even the most elemental aspects of the complicated architecture of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, seems to have spent enough time paying attention that he understands many of the finer points, and yet he has not forgotten how to speak a version of English that the uninitiated can still understand.

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Having sped past the U.S. as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, China has become a despoiler on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion, plundering smaller nations to fuel its own rising tide of consumption.

A New York Times article just after the UN climate-change conference in Indonesia identified China as the pivotal determinant on global warming. Now, the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine has drawn a scathing portrait of a nation that not only leads the world in coal consumption, but also uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations – the U.S., Russia and India – combined, with ominous implications for the planet.

China says that as a poor nation of 1.3-billion people, it is entitled to pollute and spew greenhouse emissions to alleviate poverty. But with its middle class projected to leap from less than 100 million to 700 million by 2020, and with sales of Porsches, Ferraris and Maseratis flourishing in Beijing, that argument is rapidly losing its edge.