Time will tell whether Al Gore deserves great praise for pushing the issue of global warming. What is clear right now is that the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike the other Nobel prizes, has become a pathetic joke. In fact, this has been clear for some time.
The Peace Prize ought rightly to go to someone who has done something extraordinary for the cause of peace. Glancing back over the list of past winners, you can find a lot of worthy recipients. Jimmy Carter (2002), for example, certainly deserved the award. I stand second to none in my contempt for Carter's behavior in recent years, but President Carter did broker peace between Israel and Egypt. That achievement stands to this day as one of the few successes in Middle East diplomacy. And it was Carter's personal achievement. He mastered the details of the situation in a way that few Presidents could have done, and brought the power of the United States to bear on it.
By contrast, the 2006 award to Muhammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank was absurd. Now I think the Grameen bank is one of the most promising and beautiful social experiments of the last century. The bank gives small loans to the most marginal persons in the third world, allowing them to make some investment that gives them a purchase on their own destiny. What a great idea! It just doesn't have anything to do with war and peace. Of course the argument is that economic development at the bottom will lead to peace, and in the very long run that might be true. But in the short run the very opposite is often true. Economic development often leads to war, as it did with Germany in the 19th century, and may yet do with China in this one. There ought to be some Nobel prize for people like Yunus, but the peace prize isn't it.
And then of course, there are the obscenities. Yasser Arafat shared the prize in 1994. No one ever dedicated more of his life, with more fervor, to the promotion of war and the murder of innocents than Arafat. The peace agreement between Arafat's PLO and Shimon and Rabin's Israel was a mirage. Arafat had neither any intention nor indeed the power of making peace. One might better have awarded the Peace Prize to Saddam Hussein. At least he could have chosen to avoid all the wars he started.
The most obvious problem with the Peace Prize is that it doesn't follow the model of other Nobel Prizes, like literature or physics, which are typically given to people whose great achievements happened decades before the award. That may be sad for the scientists who have wait until their hair is gray, but it gives the judges a better perspective on what really deserves the honor. The Peace Prize could easily be awarded the same way, but instead it's like the academy award for best soundtrack. Who remembers the music from Passage to India, which won it? Who doesn't remember the music from The Natural, which didn't. The Peace Prize is typically given to this year's greatest left-wing hit.
And this year's hit is Al Gore. Here is how the Norwegian Cardinals justified their choice of a Pope:
I Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the livingconditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.
Now consider how tenuous is the connection Gore and the IPCC, on the one hand, and peace on the other. The work of the former may lead to real progress on the environment. Or not. Given that Gore's swimming pool has a larger carbon footprint than my neighborhood, I have my doubts. But there is no way to know whether Gore's ministry will result in any achievement whatsoever. And while it is conceivable that global warming might lead to "violent conflicts and wars," it is just a likely that measures to combat global warming will place "heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries." Vulnerable countries are, well, more vulnerable than developed nations when the economies of the latter turn south.
It's been a good year for Al Gore to feel better about himself. Giving him the Nobel Peace Prize was idiotic.
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