The conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore last week epitomizes how people continue to be fooled by political leaders who claim to promote causes in the name of saving civilization.
Gore, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was awarded "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change," according to the award's selectors.
Contrast these words with the message of Alfred Nobel in his will, who explained that the prize's purpose was to recognize those who have "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." The reasoning behind the selection of Gore was not consistent with this ideal because the policies he supports would hurt mankind more than benefit it.
One clear distinction needs to be emphasized when discussing global warming. Those skeptical of activists like Gore and MassPIRG do not deny that global warming exists or even that particular temperatures nowadays are higher than those at the turn of the 20th century. In fact, they do not even dismiss the possibility that human activity is partly the reason why these temperatures have risen.
But the issue is the extent to which this human activity is responsible for this rise, and whether anything should be done to combat global warming through government mandates. Coming to conclusions about the former can be left to scientists, but the latter needs to be scrutinized by all people.
One of the main goals pushed by activists is to reduce the amount of carbon emissions produced by factories. What if we applied this reasoning to the Industrial Revolution, in which widespread capitalism enabled manufacturing, trade and agricultural advances to expand in Western Europe around the turn of the 19th century? In this situation, global warming activists would have preferred to prevent businesses from developing products if the carbon emissions produced by factories exceeded an amount determined by environmentalists.
If this were the case, the unintended consequence would have been that many of the industrialized products would not have reached the general public, rich or poor, so quickly. Specifically, poor people would have had a harder time accumulating wealth if government mandates had limited what individuals and businesses could produce.
The changing economic structures in China and India are more contemporary examples that illustrate how limited government confers a benefit greater to mankind than expansive governments enforcing carbon emission caps. The rapid rise of people out of poverty in these two countries signals a distinct departure from their past socioeconomic conditions in which individuals were mired in destitution under their respective governments' control of markets. This current progress would have been stifled if China and India had adhered to the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty calling for caps on greenhouse gases supported by Gore during the Clinton Administration.
Although political freedom is still a pressing issue in China, the fact that it passed legislation this year further guaranteeing property rights suggests that their nation is advancing in the right direction. If one defines bettering mankind as empowering people to rise out of its impoverished conditions to live free of government coercion, then Gore cannot be considered someone who has promoted this goal. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that he has supported policies that encourage governments to undermine humanity's march towards liberty.
Some people will argue that while Gore did not directly promote world peace or better mankind, he highlighted an issue that, if overlooked, could lead to conditions that would cause the end of civilization.
Such reasoning is emblematic of the cyclical opinions of the environmental community claiming to raise awareness of this possibility. Science Magazine claimed in 1975 that a prolonged ice age is very realistic, while Newsweek expressed similar concerns over global cooling around the same time. This cycle is important not because it shows the unpredictability of global temperature patterns but instead reveals how the thinking inherent in the minds of environmental activists from today and yesterday encourage policies intended to "do something" about an issue which more accurately could be depicted as being counterproductive towards bettering humanity.
More appropriate choices for the Nobel Peace Prize would have been the Iraqi National Police, a group admirably struggling to secure an unstable country; Wajeha al-Huwaider and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, female activists heroically pushing for basic rights in Saudi Arabia; or Liberty in North Korea, an effort to assist refugees escape to free nations.
Contrary to the opinions of global warming activists and Nobel Peace Prize judges, these individuals - by advancing democracy, freedom and peace - have conferred a greater benefit to mankind than Gore will ever think of doing. Because the aforementioned people do not have the luxury of making widely disseminated PowerPoint presentations or organizing worldwide concerts, it is up to future Nobel Peace Prize judges and humanity as a whole, to recognize the genuine promoters of a better mankind.
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