People from New Zealand to America readied themselves for the awarding of the world’s most prestigious award, tuning their TV sets to CNN, their computers to BBC.com, and radios to NPR: it was Nobel Peace Prize Day. Eager to celebrate the most brilliant, compassionate, and certainly influential citizens of this planet, the world deliberated whether a Vietnamese Monk or a Burmese Republican would flaunt the next ever-sought medal. The world waited for its next inspiring story—the next Mother Theresa or Muhammad Yunus, the creator of a bank dedicated to helping poor women through micro credit.

As the anticipation of the award reached its zenith, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee convened with the press: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

The announcement took the world aback: Al Gore? How on earth did Al Gore just win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Backlash from Americans and the rest of the world alike ensued almost immediately: how could a Hollywood star win the Nobel Peace Prize? Should Michael Moore win the next Peace Prize for sparking awareness with his slightly-but-not-exactly-related-to-world-peace movies? And how could a prize attributed to benevolence be given to a man who furthered his political career in his "An Inconvenient Truth?" How could a man who adds 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere each year, a man who uses as much energy each year as twenty Hummers do, and a man who uses twenty times as much electricity and natural gas as the average American be the chief defender of the planet’s well being, never mind peace? Certainly, Al Gore has contributed greatly to the spread of awareness about climate change, but he’s a politician—what has he done besides talk? How could such a prize go to the man who has used his platform to abet his political plan to take the Presidency? And would Al Gore run for President?

As contentious and certainly unorthodox as the explanation was for Al Gore’s winning the Peace Prize, debate whether Al Gore should have won the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t help us move forward; learning from it does. Instead of arguing for or against Gore’s credentials, or against the exact evidence that he uses, we can accept this award as a message to humanity that we need to act. Instead of declaring the Nobel Prize a farce, we can take this message as a sign that we need to follow the bi-partisan lead of McCain and Lieberman—and actually act. Instead of debating the presidential aspirations of a man, we need to acknowledge that energy crises will lead to war.

Al Gore, after all, wasn’t the sole recipient of the Peace Prize. The media spent little time on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s shared victory, instead focusing solely on Gore, his credentials, and his possible presidential run. Certainly, Gore is the figurehead of the whole anti-global-warming movement—he inspires as no scientist ever could. But the award went not to a man, but to a cause—thus, two distinct bodies won the prize. Nevertheless, all articles related to the Peace Prize focused not on Gore as a model for mankind, or on the good he and the UN panel have done for mankind, but on the credentials Gore has gained because of the award, prophesying a possible run for president in 2008. Are we really turning the Nobel Peace Prize, the world’s most honorable award, into another one of the war medals that politicians use to show their patriotism? If we are, we are simply ignoring that which the committee is putting forth: that climate change is happening, and it is affecting world peace.

What exactly does climate change have anything to do with peace, as well as the mitigation of the world’s rampant conflict and poverty? The answer: everything.

If our planet continues to heat up, then it is the extreme places of conflict and poverty in the world that are going to be hit the hardest, not Manhattan. Many countries in Africa have already experienced the first effects of climate change. The genesis of the struggle in Darfur can by traced back to its severe drought and strained resources. When the black Africans of the South first took up arms, it was because they were upset with the Sudanese government and its lack of attention to their plight. After all, most of the black Africans were farmers who heavily relied on rain for survival. That was only the beginning, of course, as the Sudanese government then gave arms to the northern Arab tribes in order to fight back. But there has always been an ongoing tension between the black Africans and the nomadic Arabs, fueled by competition for Sudan’s limited water and fertile land.

We could give the Nobel Peace Prize to the organizations over in Darfur actually saving lives and trying to end the war: all of them are certainly very deserving. However, we cannot end the conflict in Darfur without paying attention to the underlying causes of the fighting. There is only so much emergency aid we can give the people, only so many refugee camps we can set up without infringing on another country’s peace, and only so much we can do to stop the Janjaweed from their genocidal raids on Darfur. Without food and water, the people of severe crises have no choice but to resort to the kind of inhumane killings the world has been trying so hard to stop.

Sustainability, thus, is peace in Darfur: sustainable resources mean adequate water, available energy, less competition for living essentials, and subsequently less war. Sadly, Darfur is only the precursor to the scary energy wars that could ensue in coming years: China and India are energy-hungry countries who will each reach nearly double the energy consumption of the US and Europe combined in the near future. With non-renewable energy resources drying up fast, renewable resources become our crutch. But if these resources become affected by global warming, if ocean patterns change, and if lakes dry up, our crutch will snap as Darfur’s did.

After all, a man who loses his basic needs will do anything for his resources, including killing another man: it’s simply an evolutionary trait. History has proved the former, for World War II was sparked in part by Germany’s and Japan’s lack of money and resources. The Soviet Union all but colonized Eastern Europe so as to tap its energy reserves, and the European imperial powers used North America to quell their ever-growing thirst for resources and wealth. A lack of resources could mean a start of war, and a beginning to the brouhaha that could determine which races of humans survive, and which go extinct. And this time, it might not have so favorable an ending as World War II, the last major energy war, did.

Indeed, the problems of destroying our world, killing polar bears, and abetting wars that could spread from Africa to the Poles are apparent. But the question always looms of what the average man can do to change the world. No individual, after all, can rid the world of all carbon emissions. The advice about turning off lights, using hybrid cars, using energy efficient lights and appliances, and unplugging chargers has always existed, to the point where Americans all but ignore such advice. But such efforts only go so far to stop carbon emissions, having a near negligible effect on the world. How, then, do we matter?

Hybrid cars are still expensive, as is setting up geothermal heating. So how can we completely erase the carbon footprint we have on the world, cheaply? What if we could counter every single pound of carbon we put out—together? What if everything above were pure?

Well, it is. The seemingly impossible costs only thirty dollars a year per Choate dorm room, and about one hundred per house each year, with the TerraPass. The TerraPass allows each person to save the world from tens of thousands of pounds of carbon emissions, and every pound of carbon dioxide and methane he or she adds to the world, by using dollars to fund wind farms, methane capture in dump yards, and carbon reduction projects, so that the methane we help capture neutralizes, pound for pound, the waste we send into the air each year.

We can waste our time, energy, and money on debating whether an unpopular Hollywood star deserves a prestigious prize, or we can choose to accept the message of the committee and act, or we can elect to buy our own dorm-sized TerraPass. We can separate peace and conflict from climate change and drowning polar bears, or we can connect the frighteningly linear dots. We can deliberate on the future of Iraq, focusing on quelling the symptoms of the tumor, or we can focus on the central cause of war in this world, and remove the malicious tumor from the world altogether, by backing Bush’s energy plan for the future.

Maybe now, we can at last bring together scientists, activists, and politicians to attack the world’s problems from all angles. Maybe now, the world will wake up, and rise above party lines, economic ambitions, and political dogma. Maybe now, we will acknowledge the problems of the world before war and heat engulf the world. Maybe now, we can finally have peace amongst the peacemakers.