Salon: When I lived in Taiwan in the mid-1980s, a version of the same news story would run every summer, right after temperatures spiked to their highest point of the year: “Electricity consumption breaks all-time records!” The news was reported with pride, no matter how badly the nation’s electricity generating capacity was stressed, or how close the big cities came to black outs. Because the underlying narrative was the story of a nation whose standard of living was leaping forward each …