HBO ’s Chernobyl miniseries hasreinvigorated our collective fascinationwith the 1986 nuclear disaster that may havein part contributedto the Soviet Union unraveling .
But the lesson the show imparts are n’t about how nuclear tycoon and communism are Bad . The miniseries ’ gritty , repulsion flick - similar atmospheresets up radiation as an invisible agent of death . But the real play drive the five episode is the battle of expedient lie versus inconvenient truths . In doing so , the show ’s Maker have made a drama that can tell us a lot about humanity ’s most pressing challenge today : clime alteration . It ’s a warning tale .
It ’s impossible to not see parallels in the threats : the inconspicuous radiation cower into every corner and cranny of Pripyat and the invisible glasshouse gases piling up in our atmosphere . Similarly , both the detonation and atomic radioactive dust that take after at Chernobyl and the current mood crisis require a free burning , coordinated reply to keep big calamities from unfolding .
Image: HBO
At its heart , Chernobyl is about the battle to set the truth free in the case of lies design to preserve the system , something that builds in the next-to-last episode and descend to a school principal in the 5th and last sequence . The show ’s booster Valery Legasov , a Russian nuclear scientist , is caught in the middle of this tugboat of war .
Legasov is conscript by the land to aid deal with the blowup that nearly caused one of Chernobyl ’s atomic reactors to meltdown , but he and Ulyana Khomyuk — a fictional physicist who is stand in for all the real - life scientists that Legasov work with — find oneself that the nuclear reactor had a fatal flaw in its shutdown mechanism that have it to explode , a flaw that live in all the Soviet reactors . Legasov is asked to hide this truth in testimonial before the world in Vienna and at the land visitation for the plant ’s hustler . He leave out these fact in Vienna but chooses to tell the verity during the operators ’ trial in Chernobyl . The KGB pull him apart afterward , lock him in an abandoned basement elbow room . There , the show ’s fictional KGB conductor meets with him and say he will be forced to hold out in professional deportation before agents shuttle him out to a wait car . The last guess in the show is an ethereal view of that car shuttling him through the Exclusion Zone back to an ostensible lifetime of exile in Moscow . In a voiceover , doer Jared Harris — who played Legasov — let out the last words of the show ( emphasis ours ):
“ To be a scientist is to be naive . We are so focused on our search for truth we break down to consider how few actually need us to find it . But it is always there whether we see it or not , whether we take to or not . The truth does n’t care about our needs or wants — it does n’t care about our governments , our ideologies , our religion — to lie in waiting for all time . This at last is the gift of Chernobyl . Where I once would fear the monetary value of truth , now I only ask what is the cost of lies . ”
The chilling words certainly apply to all that was on screen during Chernobyl ’s five episode , but they just as easily apply to our world today and how existence leaders have choose to look climate change to engagement . Scientists have warned that the cardinal altering of planet ’s atmosphere that has n’t been seen in millions of years could pass to thecollapse of nature , passion expiry , uninhabitable coasts , and other harrowing consequences . The endangerment have never been clearer , but the the true about the climate crisis — that human greenhouse gas pollution is the cause — has been staring us in the nerve decades . Scientists ’ monition have only gotten louder , and Chernobyl ’s final monologue would n’t be out of shoes during a press conference announcing any one of theincreasinglyhorrifyingreportsreleased in the past class alone .
While the Legasovs of 1980 ’s Soviet Union were trying to reveal truths in the face of an all - controlling state , the scientists of today confront a much dissimilar opposer . That includes not just conservative politician who view climate variety as anathema to their worldview , but also a legion of billionaire presenter who fetishize the gratuitous grocery and press out every last drop of oil and lump of ember potential from the reason . It also includes tumid corporations such as Exxon whose own scientistswarned of clime risks as early as the 1970seven as the company seed incertitude in public . The vested interests that have gotten rich off an economy tied to fossil fuels are understandably having a hard time acknowledge the good time will have to come to an end . And it ’s this backdrop — the alignment of the ruling and bottomlessly monied classes — that poses the large roadblock to the true telling today . It ’s whygroups like Extinction Rebellionare calling on governments to literally “ differentiate the Sojourner Truth . ”
Craig Mazin , the Chernobyl ’s writer and God Almighty , had this tosay to Slateabout what to take aside from the show ( emphasis ours ):
“ We live on a satellite that is under threat , and scientists are warn us , just as they did in the ’ seventy regarding RBMK reactor in the Soviet Union . Governments are choosing to take heed or not listen , and people are choosing to listen or not hear . But the Sojourner Truth , the Earth , the thermometer , does n’t handle . And the RBMK did n’t deal either . It did n’t count what they wanted to do that dark . It did n’t matter that the fatal fault of the RBMK nuclear reactor was a country secret . The reactor did n’t deal . And that ’s the problem we struggle with . We are attempting to make ourselves superior to fact , and we are not . ”
I ’m not saying the Chernobyl disaster is the thoroughgoing climate analog . The 1986 explosion represent a delineation between “ before crisis ” and “ after crisis ” . There is no orderly stemma for mood change . We ’ve been pump invisible poisonous substance into the atm for 10 and the change it ’s rend unfold around us day by day , slowly strangling what the worldly concern once was like a boa constrictor . And the world of 2019 is much different than the Soviet Union of 1986 in terms of the riches that could be deployed if it chose to act . Also , most world leadership go for the scientific discipline of climate change ( with onevery notable exception ) , intend they ’re not as profoundly in denial as Soviet leadership is portrayed in Chernobyl .
Butcarbon emissions uphold to uprise , indicating that world leader are still lying to themselves and citizens aboutthe crisis that ’s extend . It may be a lenient shape of self-renunciation , but as long as it carry on , the cost of the prevarication will proceed to rise .
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