The Chernobyl disaster was not the result of undermining expertise. It was the result of the deliberate suppression of scientific analysis by a totalitarian state with the power to terrorize people into silence.

The comparison of Chernobyl to the climate change debate is also bizarre, quite beyond the paranoid premise that America now resembles anything like the dystopian Soviet nightmare depicted in the mini-series. It is considered an article of faith that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. Yet in the Soviet Union, the “scientific consensus” was that a RMBK reactor literally could not explode, because dissent was silenced by those with power.

There is no shortage of studies and debate about climate change today. Prominent Democrats propose a Soviet-style planned economy to address it. And their Green New Deal eschews reliance on safe nuclear power plant designs, even though they are the most realistic way of reducing carbon emissions on the scale Democrats and so-called democratic socialists envision. So much for deferring to experts.