Nuclear

Review: Too Much Magic by James Kunstler

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…Kunstler has a new work of social criticism titled Too Much Magic, his first nonfiction book since The Long Emergency came out in 2005. The book is an inquiry into a skewed, delusional perception of reality that Kunstler thinks has become “baseline normal for the American public lately.” Americans, he says, have been led astray by the incredible technological advancements of recent times. We’ve come to believe that any problem we face is solvable—as if by magic—with the application of some new technology.

Our years of magical thinking: interview with James Kunstler

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“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson

“That’s a pithy way of saying where our country, perhaps the developed world, is at right now,” notes author James Howard Kunstler. We’ve blown past the mileposts for global peak oil, says Kunstler in his new book, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, and we expect technology to save us.

Can we bear the legacy costs of industrial society’s toxic pollution?

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The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stunned the nuclear industry last week by putting power plant licensing decisions on hold while it reconsiders rules on nuclear waste storage struck down by a federal appeals court in June.

The issue is part of the much larger and troubling question about the legacy costs–economic, social and environmental–of toxic industrial pollution that are mounting with each day. We’d like to think that we can simply take our industrial wastes and throw them away somewhere. But increasingly, in what economist Herman Daly calls our “full world,” there is no “away.”