NEW YORK – Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore on Sunday urged a gathering of more than 500 business leaders to push for a global agreement on curbing global warming pollution, saying “Mother Nature does not do bailouts.”

“The market signals on energy are badly misleading and wrong. We do not take into account the cost of pollution,” Gore told the meeting of chief executives from global industry giants, including PepsiCo Inc.

“If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth’s atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet,” Gore said.

“But there is good news, because the world’s business community is beginning to respond,” said Gore, whose address was shown via a live web cast from the Copenhagen Climate Council’s Web site. See site: www.copenhagenclimatecouncil.com

The three-day World Summit on Climate Change meeting, which began Sunday in Copenhagen, comes in advance of December talks to determine what will replace the Kyoto climate treaty that expires in 2012.

While the United States is far behind Denmark, where nearly one quarter of the energy produced comes from wind, in each of the last two years “the single largest source of new electricity generation in America has been wind,” said Gore.

Gore told the gathering it made sense to have the business community gather six months ahead of political leaders, saying “it is critically important that we get the rules of the marketplace correct so we can make decisions both in the political realm and the business realm that will allow us to live our lives in a way in keeping with which we know to be right.”

Saying there remained time to act to avoid the direst consequences of global warming, Gore called for rapid action to stem the problem.

“We have to do it this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts,” the former vice president said.

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