Wednesday during CNN’s climate town hall, Democratic presidential hopeful Mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg called inaction on climate change a “sin.”

Buttigieg said, “There’s a lot of evidence that the Syria civil war is one of the first that was partly caused as a consequence of climate change. We want to talk about security, let’s talk about securing the lives of future generations. Let’s talk in language that is understood across the heartland about faith. If you believe that God is watching, as poison is being belched into the air of creation, and people are being harmed by it. Countries are at risk of vanishing in low lying areas. What does God think of that? It’s messed up.”

He added, “You don’t have to be religious to see the moral dimension. Frankly, every religious and non-religious moral tradition tells us that we have some responsibility of stewardship. Some responsibility for taking care of what’s around us and our neighbor. Eventually, it gets to the point this is less and less about the planet as an abstract thing and more about specific people suffering specific harm because of what we’re doing right now. At least one way of talking about this is that it’s a kind of sin.”

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