So what do we make of the Nobel Prize Committee awarding Al Gore a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize? Much has already been written that reflects a wide array of thinking on Gore being named the Nobel winner. On the liberal website Alternet, there is an article about how the right is using his Nobel Peace Prize win as more fuel for their smear campaign. The Democratic Party front group MoveOn.org has a big congratulation to Al Gore on the front of their website and the Draft Gore in 08 website is hoping to use the announcement to get more signatures and put Gore on the ballot in next year’s presidential election.
There has also been a fair number of articles from left or more radical writers that tend to be equally suspicious of Republicans and Democrats. Many of these articles take a critical look at Al Gore during his tenure in the Senate and as Clinton’s Vice President. Joshua Frank, author of Left Out: How Liberals Helped Re-elect George W. Bush calls Gore “A Prime Time Hypocrite.” Frank takes a serious look at Gore’s environmental track record and his personal profiting from owning stocks in Occidental Petroleum. Frank cites Jeffrey St. Clair’s book Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, a book that exposes how the Clinton/Gore administration was friendly to the oil, logging, nuclear and mining industries. Frank also points out that even on the issue of climate change Gore was not in any way progressive while in the White House. The Clinton/Gore team would not sign on to the Kyoto Protocol with this rational, “As we have said before, we will not submit the Protocol for ratification without the meaningful participation of key developing countries in efforts to address climate change.” In other words, we will not take the lead on this issue. Many people might say “but now he has taken the lead and made Climate Change part of the national dialogue and therefore deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize.” Let’s take a look at the idea that Gore has made climate change part of the national debate and then the idea of who is deserving of the Peace Prize.
Like many social movements there are those who do the work for years and get no recognition and there are those who stand on the shoulders of grassroots activists and take credit for making people aware of a particular cause. There have been scientists, activists and organizers who have been fighting Global Warming for years, long before Al Gore decided to take on this issue. In 1997, Martin Khor, director of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, said this about climate change, “Climate change (and its convention) is emerging as perhaps the most economically and politically contentious and significant of all the global environmental issues because the decisions taken on countries’ emission limits or reductions will have substantial implications for limits to and quality of energy use, industrial production, and overall economic growth.” Many Third World activists have been leading the way on the issue of global warming and pointing out that it is the US and other major industrial nations that are most responsible for the warming of the planet.
Another important point about Al Gore’s recent interest in climate change is that it isn’t the same thing that grassroots activists are advocating for. Gore has been promoting more of a corporate style approach to reversing Global Warming, with a message that is less abrasive to American audiences in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Gore does not advocate any radical critique or alternative to reducing CO2 output. Journalist Mitchel Cohen writes, “Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis. At one point, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on U.S. oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What it all comes down to, for Gore and the Democrats, is that we need to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.”
So the question still remains, why would the Nobel Committee give this award to Al Gore? Well, let’s take a look at the organization who awards the Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The Nobel Peace Prize was begun by Alfred Nobel, a chemist who developed and later patented the explosive known as dynamite. Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” So how does a business-model for greenhouse gas reduction work to reduce or abolish standing armies? This is not to say that the Nobel Committee never awards the prize to worthy individuals. The great civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. won the award (1968), along with Burma’s human rights advocate Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), and Mayan activists Rigoberta Menchu Tum (1992). However, a close look at who has won the award since 1901 have been mostly men from imperial nations. This list includes men like Teddy Roosevelt (1906), former US Secretary of State Elihu Root (1913), Woodrow Wilson (1920), another US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1945), Henry Kissinger (1973), and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat (1978). Many of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize have been high-ranking government officials who had extremely questionable commitment to abolishing or reducing standing armies. In reviewing the list of winners it is somewhat understandable that Al Gore would win the award in 2007.
Possibly the best response I read online to Gore’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize came from the Rainforest Action Network in a short piece entitled “Al Gore should be arrested.” Here is what the RAN statement said:
“Today, the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Al Gore (and the IPCC). No one deserves it more than he does. We’re very happy for him. And we think he should go to jail.
Specifically, he should go to jail on RAN’s November 16-17 Day of Action Against Coal Finance. As reported in Nicholas Kristof’s NYT column on August 16, Al is on record as saying:
“I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers … and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”
Well, Al, it’s because by the time they’ve rolled out the bulldozers, it’s already too late. That’s why Rainforest Action Network, Coal River Mountain Watch, Appalachian Voices and thousands of supporters are mobilizing to stop Bank of America and Citi from financing coal extraction and the construction of those coal-fired power plants. We at RAN would really like you to come along.
If you, too, think Al should be arrested, go ahead and sign our petition asking him to be arrested with us. I will personally guarantee you that if Al is going in the slammer, I’m coming with him. How about you?
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