Environment

Al Gore Does Not Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ October 12, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for creating “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming” (see also BBC, Bloomberg, Guardian, TED, Time).

And what does this have to do with peace?

Last year, the prize was awarded to Yunus and the Grameen Bank, recognizing the need for poverty alleviation for lasting peace. Never mind that the link between microfinance and poverty alleviation is tenous at best, I cheered nonetheless because Yunus has made other significant contributions, not least of which is to prove that the poor can be part of an economic cycle.

But now, in trying to ride the climate change bandwagon, the Nobel Committee is going too far. It is turning itself into a follower of what is cool in the development community. Last year was microfinance, this year climate change, next year who knows.

I have another candidate pair for the Peace Prize - Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfield. Through their combined arrogance and incompetence these two turned Iraq into a mess. But in the process, they have set back America’s intervetionist foreign policy decisevly. No longer will, or can, the US act alone in the world. Surely, that is an outcome worth celebrating, even if it was not the intended one.

They deserve the prize no less than Al Gore. Certainly, he did much to highlight climate change and his movie made a lot of money. So perhaps he deserves the Academy Award for “most politically savvy film”. But the Nobel?

This year’s choice for the Prize bodes ill for the world. Maybe the Nobel Committee could not find any real peace makers and champions. Perhaps it is a sign that the world is sliding into chaos – in the Middle East, Burma, and elsewhere, and that democracy is so out of favor that even the Nobel Committee dare not celebrate it. Or perhaps, the Nobel Committee couldn’t be bothered to really go out there and look at who’s really doing the work. It would much rather just sit in Stockholm and bask in the glory of whoever the world has already embraced in any given year.