If Al Gore drove an SUV do you think he would have been presented with a Nobel Peace Prize this morning? Or if people found out that the Gore family property has been mined for zinc and germanium for decades. He and his dad, the late Senator Albert Gore, Sr., obtained the land in a favorable deal with the late Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum. Gore, Sr. was heavily supported by Hammer financially, and carried his water in the U.S. Senate.
As many politicians or government officers, there is a lot of dramatization and exaggerations involved with Al Gore. I don't think he is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. I don't put him up on a pedestal with other winners. I wonder where he will put his plaque...maybe next to his Academy Award or his Emmy. Maybe we'll see a picture of it on the site he founded CurrentTV. (It is a website for peer-to-peer views on important news...yeah...sure.
In his acceptance speech this morning he said, "We are what is wrong, and we must make it right ... We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war..."
Please Mr. Gore, don't go there. That comparison might be as bad as his statement several years ago when he claimed to have created the Internet. He told CNN on March 9, 1999: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Sure it is probable and possible that he had a hand in this, but to assert such an egotistical statement bothers me.
And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore, but I bet down the road he'll make it seem like he did it all on his own.
There are tons of people trying to promote global awareness of the climate crisis. Al Gore wasn't the first and he won't be the last. I'd like to see how much of the campaign money he spent on bettering our country to improve the climate. Or did those funds go to travel, book publications and concerts.
Now that he won this prize which awards $1.5 million, he is saying he will donate his share to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit organization devoted to conveying the urgency of solving the climate crisis. I am pleased by that announcement and I hope it comes to pass.
Forgive me for being skeptical, I'm normally not that way, I just don't think of Al Gore when I think of the Nobel Peace Prize. I think of Jimmy Carter, Jr. who won the prize in 2002 and Mother Teresa who received it in 1979. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the recipient in 1964. Those people are who I perceive to be bonafide winners. Ah well, what do I know anyway?
