Gore takes climate credo to fellow Baptists: At Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant

Christians who speak out for environmentalism can combat skepticism and end America’s addiction to carbon fuels, Al Gore told 2,000 Baptists who gathered to hear him during a three-day celebration of denominational unity.

“Don’t tell me we can’t solve this climate crisis. If we had just one week’s worth of the money spent in Iraq, we’d be well down the road,” Gore told the loudly applauding crowd. “This is not a political issue. It is a moral issue.”

Gore, whose environmental work produced a popular movie and book called An Inconvenient Truth and earned him a Nobel Prize, spoke for 90 minutes at the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta, pounding out a message that related extreme poverty to global warming, addressed misconceptions regarding the climate crisis and offered hope for slowing and reducing carbon emissions.

Gore said that he wanted to erase three misconceptions: That there is still argument over whether global warming is actually happening, that protecting both the environment and the economy is impossible, and that the problem is just too big to rectify.

Too many Christian leaders “who don’t really speak for me but claim to, have said global warming is not real, that it is just a myth,” Gore said. “When did people of faith get so locked into an ideological coalition?” –Associated Baptist Press