The Brave Pedestrian

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE DECEMBER 10, 2007, OSLO, NORWAY Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen. I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it. Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention -- dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace. Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name. Seven years ago tomorr...

November 7, 2007: I’m thrilled at the amount of awareness and concern there is on the issue of Global Warming. And I am delighted that Al Gore and Dr R K Pachauri won the Nobel Prize, as they have brought an enormous amount of global awareness to this cause with the movie,  An Inconvenient Truth,  and the IPCC’s report. However, I’m also alarmed at how much our thinking gets tripped up by petty technicalities, political ideologies and ego tussles. Some of us seem to believe that this entire Global Warming thing is a scare, a shibboleth, an urban myth motivated by faulty science, bad politicians, crackpot activists and sloppy journalists who don’t check their facts.   This particular post is not intended for people who hold this opinion. This post is intended for those who believe that our collective burning of  hydrocarbon fuels has brought us to a grave situation, and are wondering what mitigating responses would make a meaningful difference without be...