Cheapening a Prize

Apparently being a hypocritical let-them-eat-cake biased Chicken Little on the environment has its benefits:

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. "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."

I suppose he'll take his private jet to Oslo to pick up the hardware and, of course, the check.

As always, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus makes sense on the issue:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a rare vocal global- warming sceptic among heads of state, is "somewhat surprised" that former US vice president Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize, the president's spokesman Petr Hajek said in a statement.

"The relationship between his activities and world peace is unclear and indistinct," the statement said. "It rather seems that Gore's doubting of basic cornerstones of the current civilization does not contribute to peace."

Klaus said in a recent speech that environmentalists' efforts to halt global warming "fatally endanger our freedom and prosperity."

I would say this cheapens the value of the Nobel Peace Prize that was given to people who have actually worked to do good in the world, like Martin Luther King (1964), Norman Borlaug (1970) and Muhammed Yunus (last year). And David Keelan says he has lost all respect for the prize. But given the fact that Communists, terrorists, anti-semites, and crooks have already won the award, I'm not exactly sure how Al Gore being a hysterical hypocrite makes thing any worse than they already were.