OSLO, Norway (AP) – Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.”I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said. “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize. He said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million that accompanies the prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization devoted to conveying the urgency of solving the climate crisis. “His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change,” the Nobel citation said. “He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”
Matt Drudge must be choking. He has done more to oppose and discredit Al Gore than any single person or news outlet. Today he was forced to run the headline of his bete noir winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Sweet. But it’s not just a simple turnabout or poetic justice. Al Gore is fighting for our lives and the lives of our children–whether we yet realize it or not.
Gore has had to deflect ruthless accusations about his personal lifestyle and air travel while at the same time nobly and tirelessly circling the globe with his message. His detractors cared more about the size of his house than the state of the planet or the fate of billions of human beings. It’s a symbol of just how much greed and the craven politics of the fossil-fueled “corporate gang-bang” of the Earth have ruled the day. Telling people what they want to hear–that they don’t have to make a change or be responsible for their waste streams–has now been shown for the cynical pandering that it is. And Gore has been duly recognized as a pioneer and a harbinger of real change.
It’s a great day for the Earth. But it’s just a first step. Don’t think for a second that the deniers and obstructors of energy decarbonization won’t redouble their efforts to sow confusion and wring the last dying gasp of fat profits from carbon-intensive energy sources. Even if it means countless people being slow-cooked to death in the future. Just watch them try to claim the Nobel Prize has been politicized. They will–because these carbon-hawking Neanderthals have absolutely no shame. And we should treat them accordingly–like the cold-blooded murderers that they are.
4 comments
How AWESOME! this is an event to CELEBRATE! thank you Sean for the story… and the heads up on the obstructors. It seems ludicrous that at this point, anyone could still be resisting and denying… but, hey, greed & ignorance run deep in the human blood!
And yes, it is one of those bittersweet victories, in that the Inconvenient Truth is the maniacal DESTRUCTION of our Earth, as you outline. But… it seems to be humanity’s means for waking up… through the Dark Way…. pain and suffering is alive and well on planet earth!
For me, Al Gore represents the new advocate and those who use their fame for change and banding the planet together for a unified cause. He is one classy guy! What a different Truth we would be living in had he won the presidency. While at the same time, that dark twist of fate may just well have been what evolution was shooting for. Increduously, the earth is more important than America!
Evolution Bless the Earth!
At the risk of sounding like a broken record player, let me once again ask: why aren’t Gore’s detractors his greatest supporters?
Oil and coal will run out, or, at the very least, become too expensive to be profitable. If the largest and most powerful oil companies invested their capital in renewable energy now, they could buy the entire renewable energy market for peanuts, and then they would own the inmeasurably larger renewable energy market of the future.
Instead, they are condemning themselves to obsolence and financial ruin.
Surely this is not that hard to understand?
Sean, you have a strange sense of morality if you support this “peace” award for Al Gore. Leaving aside his flawed work on global warming, Gore was one of the supporters of Clinton’s bombing of the Balkans and the murderous sanctions and bombings of Iraq. He was a supporter of “regime change” in Iraq long before Bush was. Gore is a longtime supporter of the obscene military-industrial complex. Shame on you for tooting his horn. Alfred Nobel surely must be spinning in his grave.
@ Valhar and Darkeros, thanks!
@ Mark D. Fulwiler,
Stop right there. Read the posts in the energy transition section. I think I’m having my last debate ever with the global warming deniers. You don’t want to get me started on that right now. Oh wait. I already started.
I get it. You never met a sanction or war you liked. That means in your world we just let injustice fester forever. Nice solution.
Military-industrial complex? Isn’t that an Eisenhower term? It’s a nice simplistic meme. But I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. Power and its application are much more indirect and subtle. And we Americans surely cannot separate our resource dominance of the earth from our so-called military-industrial complex. You want to stop war? Stop the obscene exploitation of Earth’s resources by a fraction of its population.
It’s easy to trash those trying to make a difference. Positive contributions are much more difficult. Ideas?