Al Gore Shares Nobel Peace Prize with UN Panel

eldavojohn writes "Former US Vice President Al Gore has been announced as a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on environmental awareness & climate change. He shares his award with the the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 'Speaking in Washington, Mr Gore praised the IPCC, "whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years". "We face a true planetary emergency," Mr Gore warned. "It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." He said he would donate his half of the $1.5m prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, reported the news agency Reuters.'"

Comments

Re:No confidence

[morgan_greywolf]

Why? The work that Al Gore has done to raise awareness of our current planetary climate crisis is second to none. The Peace Prize goes out to individuals who raise global awareness of issues that affect the peace of the entire world, right? Wouldn't you say that climate change is in that category?

Re:No confidence

[daeg]

Climate change, even that not created by man, has the potential to cause more strife than oil ever could. It would be hard, but people can live without oil. People can't live without water or food. Small changes in climate can cause dramatic and rapid changes in local climates.

Re:No confidence

[antifoidulus]

Or Kissenger? Or ask any Korean how they feel about Theodore Roosevelt winning the prize...you aren't likely to get a very positive response.

personally I think his internet work more profound

[peter303]

People joke about Al Gore creating the Internet. But it was his sponsorhip of the 1988(?) Information Superhighway Bill that changed computer networks from an academic toy into a world wide force. It encouraged several existing subnets to adopt national standards and financed a high speed backbone that universities, companies, and government could all share. Six years later the NSF Supercomputer Center freeware release of Mosaic jump-started the application software side of the Net. And the internet pretty much became self-financing and important economic engine.

I think the Internet has had a more profound effect on human affairs than climatic change so far. And Al was an important contributer to the former. But there arent Nobel prizes for legislation.

Re:All part of the plan

[hey!]

Actually, he's already doing financially pretty well for himself as a VC.

He's got fame, fortune, influence, and more importantly the freedom to spend his time at whatever he finds interesting and fun. If a political enemy wants to stir up hatred of him, Al Gore has a better defense than Teflon: the problems of the world don't belong to him. If some but straps a bomb to himself and blows a bunch of innocent people up, nobody is demanding what Al Gore will do. Al Gore doesn't own the mortgage crisis. Al Gore doesn't have to fight the health care industry over the the way costs are bleeding US competitiveness.

So if Gore wants to speak out on climate change, he's just a distinguished private citizen exercising his right to state his opinion. You have to be an accomplished hater to work up much resentment over that.

Mr. Gore is pretty much in the catbird seat: beloved senior statesman, wealthy entrepreneur, admired environmental sage. Personally, I wouldn't dream give that up to jump into the shit pile of presidential politics, where your every utterance or sigh is twisted into a weapon of character assassination.

The only personal reason he's got to throw his hat into the ring is to get the policies he wants enacted, and that only counts if he doesn't think the next president will agree with him.