Time magazine is already showing its "pro-planet" bias by hailing Gore’s Norwegian Peace Prize as their current top story at Time.com:
Gore’s Nobel: A Green Tipping Point
Some wonder why a peace prize should go to an environmentalist. But the choice is both fitting and important
Time saw no need for balance, only for full-throated editorializing toward a liberal agenda. In an age of global war on radical Islamic terrorism, is it odd that the Nobel committee sees the lethal threat facing mankind as gas grills, aerosol cans, and the SUV?
Bryan Walsh writes like he's writing on a congratulations card, about how no one deserves this "warrior for peace" honor more than Al Gore:
Climate scientists are obsessed with finding tipping points, the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable. For environmentalists, 2007 is likely to be remembered as the tipping point when public understanding of the existential threat of climate change reached a critical mass. If that's true, no one will deserve more credit than Al Gore, who was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize today along with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Gore spoke about the threat of the greenhouse effect as a senator in the 1980s, when it was just emerging from the thicket of scientific literature, and after losing the Presidency in 2000 he crisscrossed the globe, laptop in hand, to bring a warning to tycoons, politicians and ordinary citizens alike. The Nobel citation from the Norwegian committee says it all: "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."
Gore's win was widely expected, but there may still be those who wonder how an environmentalist could be, as the Peace Prize's description goes, the person who has "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations." They shouldn't. Climate change is already a key instigator of conflict in areas like Darfur, where drought likely worsened by global warming helped trigger a civil war that has claimed over 200,000 lives. (Nor are Gore and the IPCC the first greens to win the Peace Prize; that would be the Kenyan Wangari Maathai, a conservationist and political activist who won in 2004.) As the IPCC's own reports this year show, unabated global warming will likely lead to competition for increasingly scarce resources and create waves of climate refugees in the hottest and poorest nations. A warmer world will almost certainly be a more violent one, so it's fitting that those who've done the most on climate change should be celebrated as warriors for peace.
The globalist left abhors the idea of pre-emptive war, but it's quite clear that this political prize is being offered as a pre-emptive honor for preventing wars that have yet to occur.
Walsh thinks Gore should only be criticized for being wimpy and muzzled under Bill Clinton, but now, he editorialized, he could be a "general" of a passionate and partisan army of soldiers to fight today’s Axis of Evil – corporations who sell products like oil, coal, and automobiles. He could even be an Old Testament prophet of God:
The Jeremiah of global warming proved strangely restrained on the issue during the eight years he spent as Vice President of the U.S. — eight critical years when the groundwork for preventing climate change could have been laid. He still talked about the environment, but what matters is that he spent little in the way of political capital to actually do anything about it. During the 2000 election he even ran away from his environmental reputation — "Ozone Man," the first President Bush liked to call him. It was a moment for political leadership, and Gore did not provide it.
Now he may have a second chance. The big question for greens today is: Will Al run? No one knows for sure, but the signs aren't good. One clue might be found in the statement he issued after winning the Nobel. "We face a true planetary emergency," he said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a more and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." But Gore is wrong. Climate change absolutely is a political issue, the greatest political issue of our time, and it will only be solved in the political arena, with all the mess and compromise that entails. Environmentalists hate to hear this; they think that global warming is so important it should transcend politics, as the IPCC does, and as Gore himself has in many ways these past seven years. But the final war on global warming will be fought not with PowerPoint but with politics, and it will be fought in the halls of power around the world. The scientists represented by the IPCC have spoken — what we need now are passionate, even partisan political soldiers to lead the way and push the final tipping point from awareness to action.
I can think of a pretty good general.
