“Climate change” is a “moral and spiritual issue,” said Al Gore on Monday during a CNN-produced “town hall” event hosted by Anderson Cooper.
Gore was prompted to frame “climate change” as something beyond politics by a left-wing Catholic priest named John Rausch.
Gore praised Pope Francis for hyping “climate change” as an existential threat to humanity and framed his proposals for increasing centralization of political control over human behavior to combat “climate change” as a Christian calling.
“Now I was taught in my church that the purpose of life is to glorify God and if we are heaping contempt on God’s creation, then we’re not living up to the duty that God is calling us to,” said Gore. “The way we live our lives is definitely connected to this … It’s not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual issue.”
Partial transcript below (emphases added):
COOPER: Mr. Vice President, I want you to meet Father John Rausch. He’s a Catholic priest in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky and a member of the Glenmary Home Missioners. Father Rausch, welcome.
RAUSCH: Thank you very much. Vice President Gore, as a priest living in Central Appalachia, I’ve come to realize that the climate crisis, I believe, is a crisis in spirituality.
GORE: Yeah.
RAUSCH: And I mean by spirituality a connectedness, a connectedness, a spiritual connectedness that we all are connected, we are connected to nature. We’re also connected to God. OK.
Appalachia has really fueled the prosperity of America for a long time, through its coal and other natural resources. Now, many people in Appalachia have done very well by that, and we have some very terrific middle-class people in Appalachia. There are many who are living in poverty, and they’re not only living in poverty, they’re living right next to polluted streams and mountains that have been destroyed.
So my question, Mr. Vice President, how can we influence people to see a spiritual connection in their consumer habits that they can see the consequences of their buying, those consequences have on people in Appalachia and also in other parts of God’s kingdom?
GORE: Well, thank you, Father.
And thank you for what you do. I’m a Protestant, but I’ll tell you, because of Pope Francis, I really could become a Catholic.
RAUSCH: Yes.
GORE: He — I’ll tell you, [Pope Francis] is really an amazing spiritual leader.
And one way to answer your question would be for people in all faith traditions to read “Laudato Si,” the encyclical from Pope Francis, which really addressed the question that you’re asking here.
My daughter, Karenna Gore, runs the Center for Earth Ethics here in — at Union Theological Seminary. And she was part of a study group, multi-faith, reading that. And so I got deeply into it because of her.
And, yes, the habits of over-consumption and looking for happiness in just more things, that definitely is a part of the issue, for sure.
Now I was taught in my church that the purpose of life is to glorify God and if we are heaping contempt on God’s creation, then we’re not living up to the …
RAUSCH: Right.
GORE: — duty that God is calling us to.
And so this — the way we live our lives is definitely connected to this. It is — it’s not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual issue. And thank you for bringing that up.
Watch the segment below.
Cooper regularly accepted fantastical claims made by Gore and audience members without challenge, deploying and framing terms such as “climate crisis” as axiomatic truths. He presents himself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media figure.
CNN’s “town hall” amounted to a political infomercial hyping “climate change”, a leftist euphemism for the narrative of anthropogenic global warming. It presents itself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media outlet, billing itself as “The Most Trusted Name In News.”
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