ECO-EDUCATION

Another Eco-movie: The Inconvenient Truth About "The Cloud"

As the US is debating Al Gore's movie on climate change, Germany debates the movie "Die Wolke" (The Cloud) about the catastrophic impact of a Chernobyl-like disaster in a nuclear power plant in Germany.

On April 26, CFACT Executive Director Holger Thuss was invited to participate in a public debate on this movie. Here is what he said:

Like Al Gore's movie or "The Day After Tomorrow", "Die Wolke" is not necessarily referring to the real world. It presents a present day Germany run by incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats and populated by a colt-hearted, narrow-minded population.

Endorsed by Greenpeace and financed by state agencies and perhaps by the German Friends Of The Earth, it shows a doom-and-gloom scenario, that represents the nightmares of its supporters but is very unlikely to happen.

Even worse, the film is based on a book by German author Gudrun Pausewang which is itself highly problematic. It suggests that Soviet authorities of 1986 acted on the same political, ethical and scientific grounds as the German elected officials of today.

By centering the plot of the film around a young couple that lost their homes and families through man-made horror, the book merely refers to the past of the author as an expellee from Czechoslovakia in 1945, than to the horrors of Chernobyl.

Since "The Cloud" is targeting student audiences, it should have been at least mentioned, that all major nuclear accidents were caused by Soviet authorities. Compared to the human tragedies caused by the Mayak, Semipalatinsk, Chernobyl and Wismut disasters, accidents such as Three Mile Island or Windscale look tiny and unimportant.

In the credits of the film 154 "incidents" of German nuclear power plants in 2004 are listed and upgraded to "accidents". What is not mentioned is that 95 % of these incidents were classified as "zero" on the official scale for such incidents. All other references to reality are on the same low scientific and factual level.

By this, "Die Wolke" is even more manipulative than "The Day After Tomorrow" where help and release is expected from free individuals, and not from an almighty state or crazy ideologues. And its link to the real energy debate is as strong as the link of "Bambi" to wildlife.