"A Planetary Emergency (2007)"

This Nobel Peace Prize speech was given by Al Gore Jr for his team and his "efforts to inform about man made climate change". The theme of the speech is that the worlds climate is changing. It talks about how everything that we are doing as a world is ultimately impacting the environment in a negative way. "As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising." This is part of Gore's speech. He is stating here how the actions of people are producing a lot of unnatural gasses in which are heating the planet up. The heat being produced is more that what is being extracted from the earth naturally. In the speech Gore describes how we aren't doing this on purpose, but we ignore the signs. "But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless- which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind". Basically saying how we only view things as problems that we can physically see, and that is our problem as a Nation.

What i take away from this speech is that we have to change our ways. It made me realize that by me driving as much as i do i am harming the planet in which i call home. When i read about this speech and see that the actions that everyone and i do, will ultimately destroy natural habitats, ice caps, etc. Something i feel i can do as a person after reading this is that i can help keep the environment clean by recycling and reusing material in which comes from nature so i don,t take away more from the environment. Something i learned from this speech that i didn't necessarily know before was that we "pump 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere daily". That is crazy and to be honest shameful.

I believe Al won the prize because he brought up a major, important issue that needs to be taken care of or the will be certain doom. He spoke of the problem and he gave ways in which we can over come the problem. In his speech he said "We have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, "Path-walker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk." I feel that this really sums up the whole idea of him winning because, it stats that the future isn't planned out to a T. there is room for improvement and change, we the people just need to take a stand on the issue and work to find a solution. Also i believe Al won because he took on an issue in which many people wrote him off as stupid, saying that its not really a problem.But through all of that Gore kept pushing the issue an showing everyone why it truly is a problem and what the effects will be if we don't change. He didn't sugar coat it and he was straight to the point which I feel really showed he cared, which helped him win the prize.