Keys, Thurman among Nobel concert Celebs
Doug Mellgren

OSLO(Norway)—Stars performing at a concert Tuesday honouring Nobel Peace laureates Al Gore and the United Nations climate panel said they hoped to draw attention to global warming. Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to document and spread the word about what the former vice president calls the “planetary emergency” of global warming.
Performers at the annual concert included Kylie Minogue, Alicia Keys, Annie Lennox and Melissa Etheridge. Etheridge won an Oscar for the song “I Need to Wake Up,” which was featured in Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Etheridge said Gore asked her to write the song.
“I was deeply honoured, I was deeply moved and then I had to write a song about global warming, which is not easy,” the 46-year-old singer said, adding that Gore’s efforts gave her “a great amount of hope for our Earth.” Keys said the Nobel Peace Prize underscores how the efforts of one person, such as civil-rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., can make a difference.
“For me, the Nobel Peace Prize is an extremely distinguished award for people who truly do serious work to make major change in the world,” the 26-year-old singer said. Kevin Spacey and Uma Thurman were co-hosts of the concert.
“The whole point is to raise awareness and communicate with everyone else in the world and share our concern for the planet,” Thurman said at a news conference ahead of the show. “What we are hearing is that everyone needs to get very much involved with climate. It’s coming to us. It’s coming to a theatre near us, very, very near us,” the 37-year-old actress said.
Spacey, who is artistic director of London’s Old Vic, said the theatre is starting a project next year called “Go for Green” to create a play to teach children to be more environmentally aware. “I think that showing up at an event like this is important because there are going to be so many young people tuning in to this concert,” said the 48-year-old Spacey. Lennox said the question should really be about what the world’s leaders can do.