Clearly there's no rest for the weary victors of the long presidential campaign. What seems like thousands of interest groups are jockeying for position on the new administration's agenda, evoking nothing somuch as a cloud of gnats billowing around the president-elect's head.

One of those is Canada's oil industry, which (via Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper) leapt forth last Wednesday with a proposal it is spinning as a "climate change pact" but is in truth an effort to lock in U.S. support for continuing rapid development of tar-sands oil from Alberta.

Well, as regular OnEarth readers will know, extraction and production of tar-sands oil carries some severe negatives. It releases three times the carbon emissions involved in conventional oil production. And it exacts a scorched-earth toll on the environment -- "remediation" of land after tar-sands extraction is a joke. My OnEarth colleague Ben Jervey explains further.

A quick trip around the web shows that few are buying Prime Minister Harper's gambit; let's hope the Obama administration takes a pass as well.

• New York Times blog Green Inc. provides a sober description of environmental concerns; good reader comments.
• On its Understory blog, the Rainforest Action Network says the Obama administration's reaction to this will be a litmus test of its willingness to challenge the oil lobby.
• DeSmogBlog's Jim Hoggan bought the spin a little too readily. Rapid tar sands development is just not compatible with any responsible energy/climate plan.
• Accidental Deliberations provides insider-y comments on the proposal in context of Canadian politics.
• TreeHugger posts a picture of Mordor... er, the Albertan tar sands, that's worth a thousand words. (Note: A "before" image would show old-growth boreal forest -- a huge carbon sink, clean-water resource, nesting grounds of 40 percent of North America's songbirds and waterfowl.)
• NRDC's Liz Barratt-Brown to the president-elect and the Congress-in-waiting: "Will our government continue to provide incentives to develop these high carbon fuel sources or will it put us on a path to develop a low carbon economy? We know that cleaner alternatives are available now, such as fuel efficiency, better public transportation, and renewable energy. And our latest national poll conducted on energy and gas prices shows us that almost 80% of Americans believe we need to switch to renewables too. We don't need these high carbon fuels as a "bridge" (giving new meaning to "bridge to nowhere"). We have the necessary technologies now to start to move America beyond oil."
• Jake Schmidt, NRDC international climate policy director, neatly skewers the Harper proposal.
• Finally, Al Gore's sweeping op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, "The Climate for Change," singles out tar-sands oil and other dirty fuels as the wrong path.

I found one more very interesting read on this subject: A long review in Vancouver independent The Tyee of Andrew Nikiforuk's new book "Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent." The book -- which grew out of Nikiforuk's OnEarth Magazine feature -- is a devastating indictment of oil sands development in Canada; a lot of the flavor comes through in this piece. Good reader comments here, too.

(Note: I cobbled together this batch of links with a neat web tool called Agglom; you can view all links as a slideshow or suggest that I add a new link.