Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.
"I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize," Gore said in a statement. "We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
Gore won an Academy Award this year for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary on global warming, and had been widely expected to win the prize.
His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change," the citation said. "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."
It cited Gore's awareness at an early stage "of the climatic challenges the world is facing."
Gore said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million that accompanies the prize to the non-profit Alliance for Climate Protection.
"He's like the proverbial nut that grew into a giant oak by standing his ground," Patrick Michaels, a scholar with the free market Cato Institute, said in a statement. "We can only hope that he can parlay his prize into a run for the U. S. presidency, where he will be unable to hide from debate on his extreme and one-sided view of global warming."
British bookmakers once put 100-to-1 odds on Gore winning an Oscar, becoming a Nobel laureate and becoming president. He has now accomplished two of the three, and on Friday bookies slashed the odds to 8/1 from 10/1.
1 comment:
i will have to say that despite how un-intelligent al gore can seem, he is a very smart man who truly cares about the future. not someone who just says it b/c it wins votes, etc. i am still thankful that he invented the internet, though. :)
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