What Happened on October 11th and 12th – Nobel Prize Winners Carter and Gore

 

On October 11, 2002, former President Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, served one term as U.S. president between 1977 and 1981. One of his key achievements as president was mediating the peace talks between Israel and Egypt in 1978. The Nobel Committee had wanted to give Carter the prize that year for his efforts, along with Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin, but was prevented from doing so by a technicality–he had not been nominated by the official deadline.

US President Jimmy Carter, Amwar Sadat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after the signing of the peace accords at the White House

After he left office, Carter and his wife Rosalynn created the Atlanta-based Carter Center in 1982 to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering. Since 1984, they have worked with Habitat for Humanity to build homes and raise awareness of homelessness. Among his many accomplishments, Carter has helped to fight disease and improve economic growth in developing nations and has served as an observer at numerous political elections around the world.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter shaking hands with children during the Indonesian elections June 5-9, 1999. The Carter Center has been a pioneer of the field of election observation, monitoring national elections to help deter fraud and reassure voters their votes would count.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Carter Center CEO and President John Hardman measure a little girl’s height to gauge the accurate medication needed to prevent schistosomiasis, a silent and destructive parasitic infection that leads to poor growth and impaired learning in children. General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s former head of state who now advocates for Carter Center-assisted health programs in the country, looks on.

February 13, 2007. Afeta, SW Ethiopia. Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, gives an impregnated bednet to Mrs. Hlmenlike (right), who hosted the Carters in her home during their tour of the Center’s health work in the remote village of Afeta, Jimma, in southwest Ethiopia.

On October 12, 2007, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to increase public knowledge about man-made climate change.

Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore pose on the podium with their diplomas and gold medals

Just recently we took our daughter as a potential future student to Rutgers University in New Jersey for an open house about their Meteorology program and learned that several of the University’s professors were instrumental in the work that lead to Al Gore being awarded the prize.

In 2006, Gore had starred in the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which was credited with raising international awareness about the global warming crisis.

Gore, a former senator from Tennessee who served as President Bill Clinton’s vice president from 1993 to 2001, is considered one of the first politicians to recognize the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions, a cause of human-induced global warming. Gore became interested in the topic of global warming during a college course he took at Harvard University. As a congressman, he held hearings on climate change in the late 1970s, a time when most Americans had little or no knowledge of the issue. After losing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, Gore embarked on a new campaign—the fight against man-made climate change—and gave slide-show presentations around the world in an effort to educate the public. An Inconvenient Truth chronicled Gore’s efforts to educate audiences with his “traveling global warming road show.” In the film, he details the facts and falsehoods surrounding this “planetary emergency” and describes the events in his own life that led him to become an environmental crusader.

One of the highest-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, An Inconvenient Truth played in theaters around the planet. It was credited with helping to spur the “green movement” that spread across the United States in 2007, as the media focused more attention on the problems associated with climate change. In Hollywood, actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio began driving hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and generally promoting a more eco-friendly lifestyle, while various film companies pledged to become “carbon-neutral.”

The first Nobel Prizes–awards established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) in his will–were handed out in Sweden in 1901 in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The Nobel Prize in economics was first awarded in 1969. Carter was the third U.S. president to receive the award, worth $1 million, following Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919).