Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

So it’s official: Saint Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize and, frankly, I’m disgusted. When I was an undergraduate (yes, at Evergreen), most of us regarded him as the Clinton administration’s special brand of greenwash. When he came to town, we protested. This article on Counterpunch details some of the damage done to the environment during that administration. (It was the investments in Occidental Petroleum that particularly irked us.) Has anything really changed since then?

Oh sure, An Inconvenient Truth does a fine job of raising awareness about the dangers of global warming. But then, in the end, you get reassuring messages on the screen that taking small actions, being good little eco-consumers will save us. We’re only frightened in order to see Al Gore and his brand of conservation, which does nothing to challenge the industries that have been polluting our ecosystems, as the thing that will save us. As George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning writes,

We wish our governments to pretend to act. We get the moral satisfaction of saying what we know to be right, without the discomfort of doing it. My fear is that the political parties in most rich nations have already recognized this. They know that we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about their failure to curb climate change, but that we will not take to the streets. They know that nobody ever rioted for austerity.

Last I checked, Nobel Peace Prizes weren’t supposed to be awarded for comforting the comfortable. So perhaps this is about Live Earth? The concert that allowed people to join a giant party and imagine that, by doing so they were somehow taking action against global warming? OK, so I guess we don’t even need to get into the acts’ private jets or the less-than-stellar environmental records of sponsors (like Pepsi) to debunk that one.

Now, this isn’t to say that the Nobel committee should feel bad about their decision. Afterall, it appears that The Sierra Club was fooled too.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.