Conservative carping aside, Al Gore is a perfect candidate for three reasons:

1. The award has always gone to people who have done more than just promote “peace,” such as Albert Schweitzer, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa.
2. The award has recently (2004) gone to an environmental leader, the great Wangari Maathai, who “founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots environmental non-governmental organization, which has now planted over 30 million trees across Kenya to prevent soil erosion.”
3. Global warming is a grave threat to future peace and security — as more and more experts are acknowledging. Global warming is a grave security threat, creating the possibility of millions of refugees, spurred terrorism, sea level rise, food and water shortages — water being a major source of conflict. Indeed, climate change may already have been a key factor in the Darfur crisis (see here and here).

If we avoid catastrophic global warming, Al Gore’s tireless efforts to educate the nation and the world will be a major reason. He will have prevented untold humanitarian crises and countless regional conflicts. Gore would bring honor to the award.

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The Washington Post has at least had the decency to run a rebuttal to the absurd Bj¸rn Lomborg piece they ran on Sunday (also debunked here and here).

They chose one of the top climate scientists in the country — Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I count her a friend, having interviewed her for my book and having spent a couple of days in Florida with her giving joint talks — she on hurricanes and climate (with her colleague Peter Webster), and me on climate solutions.

I recommend anything she writes (here is a great piece on the science and politics of the hurricanes & global warming debate). You can read the whole piece debunking Lomborg, “Cooler Heads and Climate Change,” here. One point in particular bears repeating:

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The prospects for a successful reconciling of the House and Senate energy bills remains as iffy today as it was last month. How sad such failure would be at a time of record oil prices and a growing consensus of the need for urgent action on climate change.

The big obstacle right now is that Senate Republicans oppose a House-Senate conference. E&E News (subs. reqd.) reports:

“It looks like Senate Republicans are not going to agree to a conference, so we will probably see the same process on this bill that we saw with several other pieces of legislation this year,” [Henry] Waxman [D-CA] told reporters after the meeting.

What is this alternative process?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) intends to reconcile the House and Senate energy bills without convening a formal conference committee.

Even this approach is no guarantee of success, as many roadblocks remain in Congress and the White House:

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Canada has about as much recoverable oil in its tar sands as Saudi Arabia has conventional oil. They should leave most of it in the ground.

Tar sands are pretty much the heavy gunk they sound like, and making liquid fuels from them requires huge amounts of energy for steam injection and refining. Canada is currently producing about one million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands, and that is projected to triple over the next two decades.

The tar sands are doubly dirty. On the one hand, the energy-intensive conversion of the tar sands directly generates two to four times the amount of greenhouse gases per barrel of final product as the production of conventional oil. On the other hand, Canada’s increasing use of natural gas to exploit the tar sands is one reason that its exports of natural gas to United States are projected to shrink in the coming years.

So instead of selling clean-burning natural gas to this country, which we could use to stop the growth of carbon-intensive coal generation, Canada will provide us with a more carbon-intensive oil product to burn in our cars. That’s lose-lose.

From a climate perspective, fully exploiting the tar sands resource would make Canada’s climate policy as immoral as ours. The tar sands are almost as bad as liquid coal.

If you’d like to see some good recent critiques of the tar sands economics and impact…

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