The historic March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which cost untold number of lives and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and mourning, was an object lesson on the unpredictable and often violent planet that we are fortunate enough to inhabit. The news media, however, quickly shifted their focus to coverage of the seemingly out-of-control situation at the crippled nuclear reactors and storage facilities at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi power station.

Video footage of the damaged power station has been seamlessly intertwined with alarmist speculation about a catastrophe. The lesson of this narrative was painfully obvious to all. Energy industry and government had sold a “false bill of goods” on society: the short-term material comforts afforded by