The Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to Greta Thunberg because it’s already a joke

The Norwegian committee actually did a good job this year, awarding the prize to the Ethiopian prime minister who ended a 20-year military stalemate with a peace deal, not the 16-year-old climate activist whose only accomplishment, so far, appears to be lecturing the United Nations.

Not that picking her would have been out of character. The Nobel Peace Prize was created to honor someone who has worked toward “abolition or reduction of standing armies,” according to Alfred Nobel. Somehow, talking about climate change has become as brave as ending war.

In 2007, the committee awarded the prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “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.”

Apparently we wouldn’t know that climate change existed without Al Gore. (We might not have the internet either!) I seem to have missed the part where he ended an armed conflict, but when political capital is at stake, that’s neither here nor there.

Barack Obama infamously won the Nobel Peace Prize for winning the White House and being cool at basketball. Just kidding, he actually won for his rhetoric about peace, which didn’t quite square with his military actions overseas. In 2017, the award went to a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, which drafted a treaty that had been signed by exactly zero of the world’s nine nuclear powers.

But the problem with the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t that it goes to people who simply don’t deserve it. It’s that it often goes to the type of people it should be condemning.

Former national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who won in 1973, boasts a resume that includes bombing Cambodians and abandoning Kurdish allies because “covert action should not be confused with missionary work” (sound familiar?). Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, who supposedly swore off terrorism with the Oslo Accords, literally paid for terrorist attacks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. The list of embarrassments goes on.

The Nobel Peace Prize became a joke when it mistook peaceful rhetoric for efforts toward armistice. Next year, the committee might as well honor Greta Thunberg. It has already awarded an old white dude for the exact same thing.

Or, it could just give the prize to Kim Jong Un. At least then it could admit that the Nobel Peace Prize is no longer about peace at all.