So, I woke up this morning to find a pleasant surprise amongst all my news sources and even in my e-mail-- Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize! Here's what Al personally wrote to me (on mass e-mail):
Dear Andrew,I am deeply honoured to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honour of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis--a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. 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. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level. My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.
The response has been mixed. Many jubilant, while others sceptical over whether Al Gore really deserved the award (they must have not received the personal e-mail). I responded (like someone who watches Academy Award winning movies) by saying that global warming will cause resource wars, and a friend's dinner response was "resource wars are going on right now" (meaning there must be someone who deserved this prize more) which made me write this e-mail to a fellow Truman Scholar...