Nobel Prize or Hollywood Oscar?


The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has given rise to a concert of almost unanimous praise. Its only victim is the cause of peace.


Certainly, in the long term, controlling climate change is likely to promote the harmonious development of mankind. From that point of view, however, the winners of prizes in medicine, physics or economics were equally deserving. Especially since it is not certain that the means to be used to force recalcitrant countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, wastage of water and raw materials will promote peaceful relations between human communities. It is, in fact, extremely doubtful.


Science is one thing, peace another. That is clear from Alfred Nobel’s own life. Scientific discoveries are morally neutral – they can serve the cause either of peace or war. And that is why there is a Nobel Peace Prize distinct from the scientific and literary prizes.


Unfortunately, however, compared with the risks of climate change, in the short term war remains a far greater evil in the early 21st century, a far greater threat to the future and one that is in fact entirely man-made. In one form or another, it spares no continent. From Afghanistan to Darfur, from Colombia to Somalia, from Iraq to Sri Lanka, it has cast a tragic shadow over dozens of countries and 90% of its victims are civilians. Thirteen years ago, the Rwandan genocide rightly shocked world opinion, but since then, the Congolese civil war that spread to all the neighbouring countries and killed five million people has met with indifference in the media. The threat of nuclear war, which people thought had disappeared with the end of the Cold War, has resurfaced in North Korea, in Iran, with the American anti-missile shield project, with China’s anti-satellite experiments; and even traditionally peaceful countries such as Brazil are thinking of acquiring nuclear submarines. Faced with this kind of world, at a time like this, is there really any urgent reason to stop defending the cause of peace? Lire la suite…

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