nobel peace prize 2007

recognition for decent politics

By Sree Sreenivasan
South Asian Journalists Association, New York

Vienna,12-10-2007(As expected the Norwegian
Nobel Committee has awarded this year Nobel
Peace Prize to Former U.S.Vice President Al
Gore to share with United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). The recognition of Albert Arnold (Al)
Gore´s contribution is in itself an implicit censure
of President George Bush, who became the
President by controversial means of combativeness!
I see this glaring since the Norwegian Committee
is known to be under the influence of the U.S.
political establishment for long. Al Gore
deserves congratulations for heralding
a new kind of political leadership.The
IPCC for an initiating intergovernmental role.
Thank you Mr.Sreenivasan. Kulamarva
Balakrishna)

A few minutes ago, I got a CNN.com news alert:
"The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to
former Vice President Al Gore and the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
I went immediately to see the exact
wording of the official citation. Here's part
of the press release:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided
that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be
shared, in two equal parts, between the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore
Jr. 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.

The South Asian connection here is that the
chairman of the IPCC is an Indian scientist
Rajendra K. Pachauri. In yesterday's New
York Times, reporter Mark Landler mentioned
the possible winners for this year's prize:
= Among those hotly rumored as candidates
are three climate-change evangelists: former
1) Vice President Al Gore; 2) Sheila Watt-Cloutier,
a Canadian Inuit who has warned of the threat
to Arctic wildlife;3) and Rajendra K. Pachauri,
an Indian scientist who leads the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the
risks of greenhouse gases for the United Nations.=

Dr. Pachauri is the Director-General of The Energy
Research Instititue, New Delhi. The IPCC
chairmanship is an elected post.

More on Dr. Pachauri, who is 67, is in his TERI bio, in
Wikipedia; and a US government climate science site.

A couple of possible reasons for Pachauri's name
being left out. One is that the Yunus and ElBaradei
have been running their organizations for much longer
periods of time (Pachauri only became head of
IPCC in 2001) and were the most public faces of
Grameen and IAEA respectively - in fact, the ONLY
public faces. (end)