Well, surprise, surprise: The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided to award the 2019 Peace Prize to someone who at least worked on promoting actual...peace.

Here's the Johnny-on-the-spot Guardian, which sets such store by such awards:

The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided to award the Nobel peace prize for 2019 to Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation and for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.

Apparently, they'd been ripping each others' heads off, and he put a stop to it. In some purviews, that's called making peace.

It stands in stark contrast to the hype surrounding young Greta Thunberg, the Swedish-backed Nobel Peace Prize favorite, who made headlines with her global warming tantrums, including a bratty, insolent, and almost comically melodramatic speech at the United Nations claiming we had all stolen her dreams. She knew nothing about her topic, but she was very, very certain about it. More to the point, she was famous only because she was backed by a cabal of corporate green hucksters intent on making a market killing instead of some kid standing on a soapbox, yelling, which is what she'd be otherwise. She's now having the time of her life on an around-the-world tour, taking in the rainforest among other things, which is every bored Swedish teenager's dream.

No wonder most Swedes are just a little skeptical of Thunberg's rock-certain claims about climate change.

You can call young Greta's melodramatics fodder for lefty applause, but it's not what anyone sane recognizes as "peace."

That's probably important to the Nobel committee, given the hits it's taken to its credibility in awarding the Nobel prize to assorted clowns whose work revolves around lefty applause instead of actually creating peace.

What kind of peace did Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize bring? He made a movie, raked some bucks, and then went sex-harassing the masseuses. What kind of peace did President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, awarded pre-emptively as the lefty seals beat their flippers, bring? Some committee members later came to say they regretted handing it over to him. Yasser Arafat? Yup, he got one, too, and nope, there wasn't any peace.

The Peace Prize has long been overdue for a credibility recovery, and apparently, that's what they were after this time, particularly since they had a good candidate, the president of Ethiopia, who actually did create something known as "peace."

He was a good choice. Because despite what you might think, Ethiopia actually is an important country, and the idea of peace coming out of it, as the lefties say, "makes a difference."

It's a big country — scratch that, a really big country with 106 million people as of 2016, which is a population even larger than what nearby Egypt has. It's got significant development issues around supplying water and a decent living standard for its growing population, but it's trying, and it's had a pretty good economy, drawing in foreign investment. The capitalist turn no doubt fed a popular interest in peace, given that market societies have an actual need for peace. Ethiopia's also Christian country, which would explain at least some of its president's interest in reaching out to its historic enemy in good faith to attempt to reach actual peace. Notice the president's quick insistence that his Eritrean peace partners be given credit, too.

We don't hear much about Ethiopian refugees and migrants, do we?

This guy obviously had the well-being of his own country in mind when he moved to end the state-of-nature warfare between itself and Eritrea (just the fact that Eritrea broke off from Ethiopia into a separate nation after a long civil war in 1993 gives you the whiff of the situation) and make peace, which really did make him a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It makes Greta Thunberg's ballyhooed global warming tantrums, famous only for their media coverage, look pretty wretched in comparison.

The Nobel committee had a reputation to recover, so run along, Greta. This time the award was about actual peace.

Image credit: Anders Hellberg via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.