Former US vice-president Al Gore has shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with a UN body for spreading awareness of man-made climate change and laying the foundations for countering it. The Nobel Committee insists that the prize was not aimed at the Bush administration which rejected the Kyoto accord and was widely criticised for not taking global warming seriously enough. In its citation, the committee has termed Gore as “probably the single individual to who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”
Agreed, he has done films, documentaries, speeches, but does Gore really deserve the Peace Prize? Has the committee reduced the world’s biggest prize to the level of an Oscar Award by rewarding the man behind ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘? Is there a link between “his activities and world peace“, as one critic has asked? Or is it a triumph of political correctness? Although Gore’s film may have brought global awareness to the issue of global warming, does the award leave all the scientists and researchers who have been toiling for years in the lurch?
Also read: Michael Crichton on environmentalism as the new religion
The first Nobel Peace award, in recent times at least, for doing nothing more than campaigning. Considering that his own home is one of the most carbon-spewing monstrosities around, its highly ironic that he is being the Nobel for spreading “awareness” about global warming… using alarmist movies, tall claims and the perennial “You are all going to die if you don’t do this now” tripe.
See
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/gorehome.asp
Is there an Alternate Nobel Prize for Back-Stabbing?
It can be given to former farmer, former son of soil from our own state!! Only he can excel anytime and everytime in it. He definitely deserves a prize for it.
Not as much as Richard Gere for Peace!!
Thanks churumuri for the link to Crichton’s speech..
As SN Balagangadhara (obba mannina maga) has conclusively established by two decades of scholarship, the most serious consequence of colonialism is not economic but intellectual. As the colonised we have lost the ability to think for ourselves, rejecting our rich tradition of scholarship. What passes off for scholarly pursuit in India is a mere parroting of talking points of the West. Now this is not – most certainly a problem – because the West is silly or stupid. The dialectics in the West have arisen from its unique currents of development; left vs. right, or body vs. mind; athism vs. agnosticism vs. theism; etc. all have a meaning within the context of the West. Among the Rest, every culture has its own dialectic (or none at all and some other dynamic instead).
Reader Alok typifies the unthinking attitude of the colonised in adopting freely available talking points that are available by the bucket load, depending upon which side of the debate you line up on. If Alok were really interested he would have cared to look up the papers published by climate scientists, the IPCC, or at least made it a habit of frequenting http://www.realclimate.org. But even the mighty Krishna Ananth would rather give space to the prattlings of a quack and hack like Michael Crichton than the learned conclusions of 1000s of scientists. Deva!
I suppose every US president or potential US president who doen’t invade other countries is should be honoured with a Nobel
Of course he does deserve the prize. And it is for the awareness, movie is only a part of the campaign. Those who are not aware of his other work are the illiterates who can’t understand anything unless it is shown to them in a fillum.
Any effort to protect the environment is a necessary step for peace in the world. It also attracts disinformation campaign from powerful oil and timber mafia. But even at the asking rate of $10,000 per “research” paper to disprove global warming they have not been able to hire more than a handful of discredited pimps with PhD degree for their campaign of denial.
Climate change is a crisis that is going to affect millions of people all over the world and the likes of Chrichton and Alok are concerned with . . . ? Fortunately we have far more people who are capable of thinking of real issues than taking cheap shots at individuals. Thanks not only to Al Gore but also to Greenpeace, Sierra Club and dozens of other organisations.