Sunday, October 21, 2007

Gore and the Peace Prize

I've been debating whether or not to discuss this, but as someone who considers himself a Green, I feel I have to...

My first reaction to hearing that Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize was, "Are you Serious?" After sitting and thinking about it for a long time, my second reaction was, "Are you Serious?" Well, that just kind of kept going.

Already we've seen people on both sides (are there really only two sides) of the political debate weighing in on this. From the Left you've had a lot of comments about how much he deserves the award and how great it is to see an environmentalist win the award. From the Right, you've mostly gotten derision, including several people talking about the relevance of the Prize given that Yassar Arafat won it. Hey, no award is perfect. The first ever Grammy for Heavy Metal went to Jethro Tull...people do get things wrong. Of course, the Right wouldn't feel this way if Bush had won the Prize...wait, let me come up with someone from the Right that's a little more likely to win...I'm thinking....I'm thinking...I'm thinking...well, anyway, you get the point.

Now, here's my take, I think it would be great to give the Prize to an environmentalist, but Gore is not a Green. Yes, he obviously is more concerned about the environment than the typical American, but he is still a part of the political system that thinks it's ok to sacrifice the environment for the sake of big business, no matter what his movie might say. The "Inconvenient Truth" is that Gore is just another cog in the system. When push came to shove during the Clinton administration, Gore sided with Big Business, again and again.

Maybe he has raised public awareness about global warming, but I think the melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and dying polar bears have done more than Al Gore. Not to mention the continued desertification of the world, the dying forests, and all the other problems that too many people are willing to stick their head in the sand about.

So, my reaction to Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize continues to be, "Are you Serious?"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, when I heard AG got the peace prize I thought, "What the heck for?" I mean what has he done for peace? What does the environment and gw have to do with peace? It's like apples and oranges. Even the Left are having a struggle dealing with this.

Maybe the NPP has run out of high profile Liberal candidates. You'll never se a Republican win the NPP either.

Strange

J Alan Erwine said...

The idea that global warming could lead to war is not too far fetched, and so giving the award to someone that's trying to do something about it would make sense...but not HIM!

If things get as bad as the worst case scenario has it, then we could see massive human immigrations, drought, famine...all of that would certainly lead to wars...it's still too early to really say what will happen, but preventing it is a good idea, no matter what.