The Museletter is the creation of Richard Heinberg, author of

(New Society Publishers, 2003).  Dr. Heinberg is a core faculty member

of the New College of California, Santa Rosa.  He has the website at the above link, plus a subscription to the print edition of the MuseLetter

costs $15 per year. The most recent issue of the MuseLetter (No. 142, January 2004) is entitled "Oil and Gas Update." It is a concise summary of recent events in the fossil fuel field, mainly how the news about global production peak is slowly beginning to sink in to certain sectors of the American populace -- mainly so far to those in the business of finding and producing oil. They are beginning to sound worried about where the oil for all those blithe government projections of "119 million barrels a day by 2025" is going to come from. Maybe we should stop making so many projections and start saving paper. A perusal of Dr. Heinberg's list of archived MuseLetters reveals him as a man of many interests.  I have ordered a bundle of these past issues, and am most curious to read the issues on "Why? (Meditations on the Nature and Origin of Evil)" "Jesus and the Devil," "Sex Changes,"  "The Musical Mind," and "Touch, Talk, Pleasure and Violence." Dr. Heinberg is a good example of the spiritualization of the thinking capacity that is now a possibility for us. When the external energy sources of reliance begin to diminish, the collision with reality can spur us to renew our link with the thought-world.The philosopher Ortega y Gasset  put it along these lines --

true contact with the real can strike with the force of a revelation.

 

How to describe Jim Kunstler? You can't. You just gotta read his

running commentaries about American cars, car, cars, housing McMansion disasters, financial foolishness, and other bulletins from La-La Land. Jim has a passion for making people see --- isn't that what Conrad said a good writer does? --- see the miserable automobile junkheap we have made of our land.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Julian migrated from the U.K. and now lives in Vancouver.

His website -- also his www.postcarbon.org --is largely devoted to

oil peak and natural resource issues. Julian is another one of these environmental thinkers who is able to incorporate literary flair and interest

in what might otherwise be ho-hum doom-and-gloom. For instance, in his

July 10, 2003, report on the Natural Gas Summit in Washington, D.C., he describes the "comfortably cooled" Mayflower Hotel (with outside temperatures climbing to 100 degrees) as "a perfect and profligate example of the absurd charade about to unfold" . . . yet one with an outcome

 "both farcical and grim." While Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham

talked in his opening remarks about how "scores of invited industry guests

would furnish short-term solutions" to the worsening energy picture, these same invited guests "...far from giving the White House a break... told Abraham that they want more gas and they want it now." Unfortunately, as Julian points out, there were no guests present at this meeting to talk about the laws of physics or even the what was still lying under the ground in reserve.

For anyone who wants fascinating reading about LNG tankers and dual-fired electicity plants, Julian Darley is your man.

I should not also fail to mention that Global Public Media publishes a lot of interesting interviews with Colin Campbell, Matt Simmons, Richard Heinberg, and others. Thanks also to Julian's interesting essay on "General Knowledge in the Post-Carbon Age," which also can be found on Global Public Media. "A Carbon Crash or Chasm means that there are some pretty stark implications for knowledge. We are going to have to rethink what we know, because what we know is really 'carbon knowledge.'... This all amounts to nothing less than a new kind of renaissance..."

As I said, a new literature is being born . . . renascimento.