The Climate Emergency is our Chernobyl

I watched the last episode of the HBO and Sky Atlantic television drama miniseries Chernobyl last night. This is utterly brilliant television, and should be considered mandatory viewing. 

I feel it is also urgent in its contemporary relevance. Consider the parallel, comparable zeitgeister of nuclear disaster and climate emergency. In both cases we see the consequences of systemic failings and decades of lies leading to both crises: the denial of Soviet fallibility on one hand; and climate change denial on the other. In each case a series of lies accumulate a debt to the truth: in the words of Valery Legasov, as depicted in the dramatisation, "every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is repaid".

The parallels continue: both were preventable, but the research was suppressed in the 1970s, on the one hand by the KGB, on the other by ExxonMobil; in both cases this suppression was achieved through control of public discourse and the media, on the one hand by the Soviet state, on the other by public relations firms and think tanks acting on behalf of undeclared sponsors; in both cases the short term gains of entrenched vested interests were given priority over the long term interests of the rest of us to the point of illegality; in both cases massive global environmental catastrophe was the consequence. And as methanocalypse has begun to unfold over the last five years, the imminence of the threat in both cases is not immediately appreciated, but requires immediate urgent action.  

The differences are few. In the case of global warming typically only the characters of dissenters have been assassinated by the apparatus deployed against them to preserve an unsustainable status quo. The crisis at Chernobyl came to a head rapidly over a matter of minutes after the reactor was stalled under secretive circumstances, whereas the climate crisis has been developing in plain sight for all to see for decades. 

Typically, sustainable energy accumulation timescales are similar to those that characterise the use of that energy, as in the case with renewables. Carbon emissions are due to our rapid and recklessly extravagant exploitation of an energy resource accumulated over geological timescales. Nuclear power relies on energy locked into heavy nuclei formed in the collision of neutron stars billions of years ago. 

Other key differences should be noted. The half-life of the caesium 137 released by Chernobyl is about 30 years. In the 30 years between 1986, when the Chernobyl incident occurred, and 2016, the radiative forcing attributable to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions has not halved, but gone up from 1.184 to 1.985 W/m2, an almost two-fold increase. Whereas the reactor at Chernobyl has been sealed within a metal and concrete sarcophagus to keep it safe for a hundred years by the largest single civil engineering operation in history at a cost of £2 billion, and the plume spreading radioactive contamination across Europe has abated, the furnaces consuming our fossil fuels remain open and are still spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at twice the rate natural processes can absorb it, leading to the increase in radiative forcing mentioned above. 

So there are key distinctions. Note that I am not drawing any conclusions about the role of nuclear power in the decarbonisation of our economies, I am merely comparing the circumstances of two specific disasters that have befallen us. The similarities are sufficient for us to declare that the climate emergency is our Chernobyl. In both cases urgent action become imperative once the crisis is revealed. And in the former, as in the latter case, system change is the "debt to truth" that now falls due.