Nobel Peace Prize

[pepokiss]

so Al Gore is the new Cher?

 

[Irvine511]

so Al Gore is the new Cher?

to her credit, Cher has bought a whole lot of body armor for the troops.

 

[last unicorn]

and Al Gore made a movie that has heightened the awareness of climate change, and he's been an activist on this subject for far, far longer than Bono has done stuff for Africa.

OK, but a lot of people say Al Gore hasn't done enough during the 8 years he was vice president.

It's good that he's being active now, I think it's great he won the prize, but I hope this doesn't turn into a Gore vs. Bono debate and about who would deserve to win the Nobel prize and who wouldn't. (btw I still feel Sir Bob Geldof should get the Nobel Peace Prize, he's been an activist much longer than Bono and Al Gore together)

I just think that whoever says Bono shouldn't win because he's a rock star should think about if Bono is really so much more showbiz than Al Gore. I'd say he isn't, but maybe putting on a show is the only way to make people really aware of something today.

 

[eltimbomofo]

......but maybe putting on a show is the only way to make people really aware of something today.

Very well said.

 

[joyfulgirl]

OK, but a lot of people say Al Gore hasn't done enough during the 8 years he was vice president.

I don't think he'd get much done as President either. He's a bit like Jimmy Carter--much better used in other ways than in the White House.

 

[angelordevil]

I don't think he'd get much done as President either. He's a bit like Jimmy Carter--much better used in other ways than in the White House.

There's a lot of truth in that, actually. You could make a similar argument for Bill Clinton. As President, you're often handicapped, and at the mercy of Congress and partisan squabbling.

As for Gore deserving the Nobel, I really think he does. Like Irvine says, he's been doing this for years...it's his true passion. It's interesting how his years in the bureaucracy actually stifled that passion many times over, yet they've also given him a vehicle to communicate his message to the general public.

To me, the environment is THE issue. The lack of action on this front is so all-encompassing that it both directly and indirectly affects the same issues Bono is focusing on--disease, poverty, access to resources. All of us, including starving children, need an atmosphere. Gore has brought that point to the fore like nobody else in recent memory.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Borowitz Report

Supreme Court Gives Gore’s Nobel to Bush
Stunning Reversal for Former Veep

Just days after former Vice President Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on global warming, the United States Supreme Court handed Mr. Gore a stunning reversal, stripping him of his Nobel and awarding it to President George W. Bush instead.

For Mr. Gore, who basked in the adulation of the Nobel committee and the world, the high court’s decision to give his prize to President Bush was a cruel twist of fate, to say the least.

But in a 5-4 decision, the justices made it clear that they had taken the unprecedented step of stripping Mr. Gore of his Nobel because President Bush deserved it more.

“It is true that Al Gore has done a lot of talking about global warming,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority. “But President Bush has actually helped create global warming.”

Even as Mr. Gore was being stripped of his Nobel, he received strong words of support from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who said that the former vice president’s Nobel win “shows that he is devoting his life to the right thing and should definitely stay the course.”

In an interview with reporters in Iowa, Sen. Clinton said that “Al Gore should remain dedicated to the cause of global climate change, at least through November of 2008.”

Sen. Clinton suggested that Mr. Gore could further research the source of global warming by immediately boarding a rocket ship to the sun.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

MADRID (AP) — Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States were "not that terrible" when compared with attacks by the IRA in Britain.

"September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible," the Nobel Literature Prize winner told the leading Spanish daily El Pais.

"Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said in an interview published Sunday.

"Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government; it killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was (attending). People forget," she said.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. About 3,700 died and tens of thousands of people were maimed in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army guerrilla group, which caused most of the deaths, disarmed in 2005.

Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Lessing in London for comment Monday were unsuccessful. Her agent's office said the author was unavailable because she was not feeling well.

In the El Pais interview, Lessing had sharp words for both President Bush and his ally, former British premier Tony Blair.

"I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning," El Pais quoted Lessing as saying. "Many of us hated Tony Blair, I think he has been a disaster for Britain and we have suffered him for many years. I said it when he was elected: This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems and he did."

"As for Bush, he's a world calamity," added Lessing. "Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."

Iran also came in for a lashing from Lessing, who was born to British parents who were living in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran.

"I hate Iran, I hate the Iranian government, it's a cruel and evil government," she was quoted as saying.

"Look what happened to its president in New York, they called him evil and cruel in Columbia University. Marvelous! They should have said more to him! Nobody criticizes him, because of oil."

 

[MaxFisher]

Simply because Gore is getting out the Global Warming message doesn't excuse his excessive energy use. That's like saying Ghandi or MLK would have been justified in using violence themselves because they were so effective at getting out the Non-Violence message.

One of my very liberal, ultra-environmental grad profs admitted the other day that Bush's TX ranch is far more environmentally friendly than Gore's home(s). Personally, I'd have way more respect for Gore and other celebrity's if they made the sacrifices my prof does. He doesn't drive and won't fly.

If you're going to get on a national soap box, pratice what you preach.

 

[Irvine511]

If you're going to get on a national soap box, pratice what you preach.

i think you should get rid of all your U2 merchandise and never buy another album until U2 either gets their wealth out of the Netherlands or Bono shuts up about Ireland forking out some of it's GDP for African debt relief, AND they should pay all those back taxes they owe on royalties because of that "artist" clause in the Irish tax code.

fucking hypocrites. why doesn't Bono just shut up about stupid Africans.

 

[Lancemc]

My biggest problem with all of this, despite the rampant usage of "The Global Warming Crisis" as a political tool, is that what exactly has Al Gore done for peace in the first place? I mean, if I'm missing something, please feel free to tell me, but I'm sure there are plenty of idividuals far more worthy of this award than he.

P.S. Mr. Gore, your movie blows.

 

[joyfulgirl]

from salon.com

Why Al Gore deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

Gore's effort to focus attention on climate change supports the goal of preventing wars

by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club

What's world peace got to do with global warming? Perhaps everything. Or it will if things don't change fast -- if, in 10 or 20 or 40 years devastating floods and droughts displace millions of refugees and spur nations and tribes to desperate bloodletting. At which point, no one will have the slightest doubt why members of the renowned Scandinavian foundation thought former U.S. Vice President Al Gore was an obvious choice for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Speculation has been growing that Gore will be chosen for the prize on Friday. Regardless of the outcome, Gore is, quite simply, the indispensable player in the drama of mankind's encounter with the possibility of destroying the climatic balance within which our civilization emerged and developed.

As anyone who read the book or watched the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" knows, Gore has been troubled by and fascinated with the science of climate change since his undergraduate days at Harvard, where he first encountered the theory that carbon emissions are slowly causing the planet to overheat. He began holding congressional hearings on the subject the moment he hit Washington in the early '70s and has not let up since -- perhaps because he understood instinctively that it was not a question of whether changing the atmosphere's chemical balance would disrupt climate, but when, and how fast.

He recognized, too, that the incredibly hard task of turning around the world's energy economy would become impossible if we waited for global warming to announce its presence, stage left, with alarum and hautboys as Shakespeare might have scripted.

So for years he accepted the thankless role of Cassandra, the Greek prophet no one would heed. But unlike Cassandra he did not sit by to watch fateful tragedy unfold. Once, when I was particularly frustrated by challenges I faced in my job at the Sierra Club, Gore heard me out and replied: "Never, ever give up." That would seem to be his motto, as reflected in the thousands of speeches he has delivered, the Live Earth concert he built from scratch, the naysaying he has endured, the movement he inspired.

What's all that have to do with peace? Look at Iraq, Darfur or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- bloody sites that have engendered three Nobel Peace prizes. Twenty-first century conflicts seldom feature stable governments colliding, but rather collapsing societies attacking themselves. These are much harder to solve with diplomacy or peacekeeping troops. Prevention is the key.

The Nobel Committee has recognized this in recent years, awarding its prize to such previously unlikely winners as Iranian feminist Shirin Abadi, and Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of microfinance for the poor.

A quick list of trouble spots that climate chaos could ignite would include:

* The Sudan and Darfur -- where the ongoing violence, fueled by drought and destitution, might be described as the world's first global-warming civil war.
* South Asia -- where India, China and Pakistan might well go to war over the shrinking snow melt from the Tibetan Plateau.
* The eastern Mediterranean, where Syria, Iraq and Turkey contest the Euphrates.
* The Chinese-Soviet border, where the loss of agricultural lands could force even more of the Chinese population north of the Amur.
* The gradually drying region around the Aral Sea -- Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan.
* Even Canada, Norway and the Soviet Union, whose governments are beginning to make bellicose noises about control of the suddenly ice-free Arctic.

In 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai. She is not a general or president. She was founder of the grass-roots Green Belt Movement, which planted more than 30 million trees across the country, providing jobs, power and education to women in the process. In the Nobel committee's words upon awarding that prize: "Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment."

The committee apparently sees Gore in a similar light, as someone who has spent much of his career staving off conflicts by uniting strange bedfellows behind the common cause of protecting humanity's only home.

In the 20th century, peace was something to be achieved after the horrifying bloodletting of world war began. In the 21st century, although the world faces a new era of turmoil, peace ultimately must be about identifying and resolving the sources of conflict before battles break out. That's why no one deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than Al Gore.

 

[joyfulgirl]

I attended a talk this week given by Tim Flannery (author of The Weathermakers, climate change expert/activist, and this year's Australian of the Year). The first thing out of the mouth of this thoughtful man who speaks with great wisdom, depth, credibility and even hope about climate change, was that he could not understand why Americans are bickering about Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize. He, too, felt there was no one more deserving.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

I like this picture, lol

OSLO, Norway -- Al Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize on Monday and urged the United States and China to make the boldest moves on climate change or "stand accountable before history for their failure to act."

In accepting the prize he shared with the U.N. climate panel, the former vice president said humanity risks sliding down a path of "mutually assured destruction."

"It is time to make peace with the planet," Gore said in his acceptance speech that quoted Churchill, Gandhi and the Bible. "We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war."

Gore shared the Nobel with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for sounding the alarm over global warming and spreading awareness on how to counteract it. The U.N. panel was represented at the ceremony by its leader, Rajendra Pachauri.

"We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency - a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here," Gore said at the gala ceremony in Oslo's city hall, in front of Norway's royalty, leaders and invited guests.

Gore urged China and the U.S. - the world's biggest carbon emitters - to "make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act."

His remarks came as governments met in Bali, Indonesia, to start work on a new international treaty to reduce climate-damaging carbon dioxide emissions. Gore and Pachauri plan to fly there Wednesday to join the climate talks.

The governments hope to have the new pact, which succeeds the Kyoto accord, in place by 2012, but Gore has said the urgency of the problem means they should aim to come to an agreement by 2010.

Before his speech, Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press that he believes the next U.S. president will shift the country's course on climate change and engage in global efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

"The new president, whichever party wins the election, is likely to have to change the position on this climate crisis," Gore said in the interview. "I do believe the U.S., soon, is to have a more constructive role."

He said it was not too late for Bush administration to join efforts to draft a new global treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

"I have urged President Bush and his administration to be part of the world community's effort to solve this crisis," Gore said. "I hope they will change their position."

The Bush administration opposed the Kyoto treaty on climate change, saying it would hurt the U.S. economy and objecting that fast developing nations like China and India were not required to reduce emissions.