Elon Musk is a Strong Candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize | Opinion

In 2007, Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for simply talking about climate change. Now, the person who has arguably prevented more climate change than anyone else who preaches about climate change, Elon Musk, has been nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. Some may assume the Peace Prize is usually given to someone who directly prevents or ends war, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter, who were instrumental in resolving conflicts like the Russo-Japanese War and the Egypt-Israel peace process.

However, they are the exceptions, as less than than 20 of the 142 total winners have been recognized for efforts directly related to ending or preventing war. Ironically, the Nobel Peace Prize was established by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Notably, the committee rushed to award the prize to President Barack Obama at the start of his time in the White House, which ended with the U.S. dropping 26,171 bombs in 2016, his final year as commander-in-chief.

It's worth asking—what liberal wouldn't have cheered Musk's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize just a few years ago? After supporting Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020, Musk was named Time's Person of the Year, a decision they explained by citing his unparalleled success in saving the environment.

Musk's largest terrestrial impact so far has been with Tesla—2021 was the year that electric vehicles finally came into the mainstream and that Tesla became a trillion-dollar company, one of only a handful in the world. It's a market that Musk almost single-handedly created, seeing long before others the demand for clean-energy transportation that the world's climate crisis would eventually propel.

In 2017, a Brookings Institution article referenced an article that suggested, "the idea that climate change will lead to widespread conflict and chaos around the world is increasingly employed as a means to convince people about climate change when other rationales have failed."

If the Nobel Peace Prize rarely goes to someone who works to directly prevent or end wars, it seems logical that someone who does something as monumental as make the electric car viable for millions of people would be the next best thing–doing something that Brookings suggests prevents war.

And yet, the very movements that claim to want to protect the environment and prevent wars are the ones vilifying the person who's arguably done the most to tackle climate change which, by extension, could help prevent wars.

In 1949, Lord Boyd Orr was awarded the Peace Prize for his lifelong efforts to "conquer hunger and want, thereby helping to remove a major cause of military conflict and war." If preventing hunger warrants such recognition, then it follows that addressing climate change should, too, if these liberal outlets are correct and both stop war.

Despite Musk's monumental contributions, there are two reasons many refuse to support him for the Nobel Peace Prize. First is Musk's support for Donald Trump at a time when liberals' focus was on keeping Trump's name off the ballot, bankrupting him, or convicting him. Second, as talk show host Meg Ellefson brilliantly pointed out, "Unsurprisingly, before he was convicted of the egregious crime of championing free speech, the founder of Tesla was adored by the left and the sycophants in the mainstream media. When he acquired Twitter (now X) in 2022, the left never anticipated that Musk would actually support freedom of speech for all."

It's especially ironic that, in the same year Musk was named Time's Person of the Year, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov "for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace." Just four years later, however, the left turned on the very idea of free speech, ostracizing Musk for dismantling the monopoly they held on information flow.