Maybe they want to boost Gores chances, in the hope that as president he would pull out US troops of Iraq and thus creating more peace in the region? Maybe they are tired of only rewarding peace and instead wants to create some?
Thinking about it, it would not be the first time. The Nobel Peace Prize commitee has a number of times given the prize according to where it would create most peace, supporting tentative peace efforts and so on, instead of waiting to see how it pans out and then hand out it out. In a way this is more in keeping with Nobels will (I think there is something about “during the last year(s?)”) than rewarding people for discoveries 30-40 years after the fact like the tendency looks in the scientific ones.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Oct 12 2007 12:55 utc | 4

Well Kissinger won the Peace Prize so one shouldn’t complain.
I guess the Committee rather wanted to honor a ‘looser’ that they like, and weren’t loath to nominate an American.
The African lady tree hugger or planter from previous went over like a lead balloon. (No criticism of her, but I have forgotten her name, which says it all.) At least Gore’s film was a success, or something. Who knows.
Gore I think reacted badly to being the patsy in the election. So he retrenched, he has pride and belief in himself, did so by going ‘global’, heh heh, on an issue that is really non-controversial, or not enough so to create serious problems, along the universalist world Gov. lines, we’re all in the sh*t together, etc. of course the Nobels like that a lot.
Gore won’t ever stand again. This was a tribute to an individual who is seen as promoting sanity.

Posted by: Tangerine | Oct 12 2007 13:39 utc | 6

gore went way too easy on industrial civilization, which allows a lot of criminal polluters to still sleep peacefully at night, thus a token peace award

Posted by: b real | Oct 12 2007 14:14 utc | 8

plushtown at 7, I meant in their Nobel eyes. I haven’t seen the Inconvenient Truth though I did intend, to orb the the spin and figure the camera angles and what not but I missed it.
Ghloball (sic) warming is a soft issue – not in reality, but in the public’s mind. It is an out-of-control thingie, some good and bad points, etc. etc. Amenable to the expected doomerism as well as the slap-on-the-back congrats, bring it on, let’s grow wheat in Siberia or finally not be so cold in the winter, here in Zurich, or Maine, or Bergen, etc. It serves to cover up, blanket out, peak oil, water shortage, agri, etc., head shaking at all the weirdness, and who knows about that Kyoto protocol, etc. And oh many all love to talk about the weather, sealed in elevators and blind offices.
Gore really needed to continue to exist. It worked, a prize. Real change is not part of the agenda.

Posted by: Tangerine | Oct 12 2007 15:59 utc | 10

as tangerine has noted any prize that hs been givent to kissinger, de klerk & rabin isn’t worth the paper its written on

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 12 2007 16:57 utc | 12

Al Gore is being rewarded for his efforts, in the same manner and for the same solution as the bloke who invented papal indulgences. back in the day when the Catholic Church ran the whitefella world and before the alleged Reformation where the church attempted to rid itself of it’s worst corruption some weird stuff to favour the rich went down. Today’s first lesson a little yarn from Argentina demonstrates the failure of the Reformation:

Christian Von Wernich’s story is one of the darkest chapters of the ‘Dirty War’. He was the priest who heard the confessions of political prisoners, passed them on to the police, and then stood by as the detainees were tortured.

If there was a god John Paul 2 would be rotting in hell for the misery of Latin America which he conspired to enable.
As usual I digress big time. Papal indulgences were a device thought up by some young up and comer in the Church Hierarchy who was tasked with solving a thorny problem.
This ten commandments bullshit was all well and good for the peasants. The masses don’t produce if they’re fucking each others wives, in likelihodd they’ll kill each other causing the loss of valuable economic units – not too mention breeding stock.
We can’t g\have em trying to steal their stuff back either. What’s ours is ours. All in all the god’s law line is invaluable for keeping things as they should be.
However that said, the rich herded like cattle, can’t be held accountable for every strumpet they grab out of a tenant’s house to bonk.
As for this business of sending them to hell for getting rid of an upstart standing between the strumpet and the fulfillment of their desire is ridiculous. As if a rich man should go to hell for killing a peasant!
Mean to say, what is the point of being rich if you can’t enjoy your wealth?
So back in the 10th century a system was organised whereby the rich would buy forgiveness off the church for large sums. Called papal indulgences. By the time of the reformation 500 years later it had evolved into a complex system of arts patronage. As well as financing wonderful art and marvelous architecture, it had enabled some of the most evil oppression of ordinary people – us mob – both within Europe and just beginning the destruction and genocide of the Americas.
Al Gore’s bullshit of reducing the multi-faceted environmental consequences of our rampant consumerist culture down to carbon emmissions and global warming has allowed the BS carbon credit system to get off the ground. People buy a block of land and plant a few trees (papal indulgences) then they kick up as much mess, resource wastage and toxicity as they like.
Of course poor people can’t pay for any of that and they will be hit with a double whammy. Not only will energy costs rise drastically, the food sources and income generating methods they once had will be confiscated so the rich can plant trees.
This is a sick perversion of everything that the environment movement once stood for.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 12 2007 21:51 utc | 14

For what it’s worth (not much I guess), but I heard Gore on Danish radio this morning making a short statement, before which it was announced that he would answer no questions.
What he said was that he and his wife were getting ready to go to Oslo to accept this honor on the behalf of all those who have worked hard and diligently and for so long to bring the reality of this crisis to public attention and the necessity for it being addressed with the seriousness it deserves. [that’s not a quote of course, and I think I spun it a but…]
Furthermore, he is donating his share of the prize money to some enviromental group — I didn’t catch which.
That said, why pick on him? As far as I can see, from the standpoint of his convictions and the access he has to the public mind he is doing the best he can to make a differnece.
Gandhi’s injuncture was that, it may not seem that the little can do makes a difference or change, but that does not absolve you from the responsibility to do the little you can do to make a difference.
Or, as Pete Seeger used to sing about the futility of what “one man’s hands” can accomplish, “…but if two and two and fifty make a million, we can make that day come around!”

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Oct 13 2007 8:55 utc | 16

I read this opinion on the Peace Prize this morning at Antiwar.com
I feel it pretty much sums up what I think about it.
Link

Posted by: Ensley | Oct 13 2007 12:35 utc | 18

Post at TPM goes into a couple op-eds today on why the right is in a tizzy over Gore. This one from Bob Herbert:

[…]In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds.
Mr. Gore was taken to task for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes. It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent.
We’ve paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn’t seem to know up from down. He’s hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He’s blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt.

And this by Jonathan Chait:

The defensiveness of Gore’s critics comes because he is the ultimate rebuke to Bush. Gore, obviously, is the great historic counter-factual, the man who would have been president if Florida had a functioning ballot system. More than that, he is the anti-Bush. He is intellectual and introverted, while Bush is simplistic and backslapping.

Personally I’d go a step further and say that Gore represents a counterfactual truth not only against bush, but the entire republican fascist/faith based machine. It’s as if with all their shrieking, they’re admitting in effect to being like Dracula, and after too long a hard days night of rampant bloodsucking, is now been caught by the morning sun.
I suppose there are reasons why, I feel like we’re reliving the 16th century.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 13 2007 20:42 utc | 20