The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and to Clinton’s ex-vice President Al Gore is not as odd as it at first seems, as the Norwegian prize committee made clear in its citation. The way the world’s climate is changing increases the danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states in a struggle for access to water, grazing and arable land.
Therefore this award is given to Gore and the IPCC not for bringing or seeking an end to conflict but rather for aiming to avert another cause for violence in our already violent world.
For Gore — whose catch phrase these days is “I used to be the next president of the United States” — this is a triumph, which may yet launch him back into politics. There is already a “Draft Gore” campaign gathering steam among Democrats dissatisfied with the front-runners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. For the IPCC, it is likely to add weight to its judgments as it seeks to bring everyone, including the United States to actually cut carbon emissions, rather than simply agreeing that something must be done.
Yet there is a problem here. That the campaign to slow climate change has now publicly acquired a peace dimension may in some respects be counterproductive. In the mouths of politicians, “peace” quickly becomes conflated with “security”. How long will it be before unscrupulous leaders who wish to pander to voters, vow to protect the threatened resources of their country from outsiders? They will, of course, agree that every state must be cutting emissions to slow the pace of climatic change. However once they have linked “climate” and “security” will they be willing to make the international compromises that will allow cooperation to mitigate the damaging consequences?
Indeed, will climate change become a geopolitical football in which countries defend what they have, put up barriers to migration from regions that have not and seek to leverage their “climate power” to their advantage? Already the Chinese and Indians are rightly suspicious that Washington is trying to use the climate change issue to blunt the economic challenge these fast-emerging industrial powers pose to the United States. The dubious program of carbon credits could be turned into a scam that makes a lot of money out of pollution while doing very little to combat it. Just as HIV-AIDS spawned a worldwide industry of hand wringers and conference attendees, so too the Nobel Peace Prize is sure to unleash a new climatic change lobby — the environmental peaceniks. A lot of people are set to become a great deal busier, but will their campaigns and media-bites have any fundamental impact on the ugly realities of state power versus global good?
In a struggle to preserve and exploit unilaterally the resources that countries still have, the wider task of working together to mitigate human contributions to climate change will take second place. Ironically the Nobel Committee, by recognizing the issue as one of peace, also validates it is a source of conflict.
