Al Gore and UN Climate Panel Win Nobel Peace Prize

Vice President Al Gore, Jr., and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee cited “their efforts to build up and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change” in making the award. The contribution this makes to peace is not immediately obvious, but the Norwegian Nobel Committee (all the other prizes are handed out by its Swedish counterpart), noted that climate change “increased [the] danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.” There is a lesson beyond that in this event, the lesson of rehabilitation.

Something amazingly wonderful happened to Al Gore when he lost the presidential election of 2000 (or rather had it stolen from him). He became a free man. All his life, he had been surrounded by electoral politics. His father was Senator Al Gore, Sr. who had also been a congressman. The younger Gore served in Vietnam, despite opposing the war, to spare his dad any embarrassment. In 1977, at the age of 28, he won his dad’s old House seat, and 8 years later, he was the second Senator Gore from Tennessee. He failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, but took the second slot on the Clinton ticket in 1992, and served as America’s vice president for 8 years. And then, he lost to Bush the Lesser and had no position at all after nearly a quarter century.

He grew a beard. He put on weight. And he started to smile. The environment always was a big deal with him; having had a family farm in Tennessee, he had a practical appreciation of ecology that few outside of farming understand. The question was, what the heck could someone without elected office do about it? He had already written a book about it when still a senator, but Michael Moore had shown how powerful the documentary film could be.

So, Mr. Gore, who had friends in Hollywood but who knew nothing about making movies put together “An Inconvenient Truth,” and won himself an Oscar for his effort. In so doing, he shut down those who claimed global warming wasn’t happening. Even the Bush administration now acknowledges that things are hotting up – they are even hosting a conference on carbon emissions (largely to prevent a real conference and treaty from arising, but that is another story).

And now the pressure will mount for him to run for president again. And that might just be a mistake. Al Gore has rehabilitated his reputation and increased it by not being an elected official. He is now a man on a mission and will use whatever means he has to pursue it. At this stage, he is America’s leading environmentalist with a worldwide respect few Americans could muster. By returning to elective politics, he would lose that standing. He is uniquely positioned to rehabilitate America’s reputation after six years of what Hillary Clinton has rightly called “cowboy diplomacy.” He should use his freedom and this new moral authority to its utmost, and that means staying as far away from the White House as he is right now.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home