Confronting Climate Change with Creation Care - Tim Darst, Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light

Tim Darst is the Executive Director at Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light, an organization that’s mobilizing a religious response to climate change. They offer Creation Care Consulting to help churches choose the best options for getting started with conservation, efficiency and renewable energy.

Tim had a comfortable career in accounting when he had a “lightbulb” moment that took him down a different path.

I had a big epiphany when my youngest daughter and I were out playing golf, we were actually practicing golf one day, it was in the summer at a city park in Louisville and she made a really long putt, got really excited about it, started jumping up and down but then had trouble breathing. She couldn’t catch her breath and it went on and on where she was just gasping for air so I took her to the local emergency room and they put her on oxygen and I asked the nurse, “what’s going on” and she says, “well, it’s an ozone alert day” and you’re not supposed to be out in this. And it turns out that there are segments of our population that are more vulnerable to this and in the summer when we’re using a lot more air conditioning, we’re burning a lot more coal and natural gas than any other time of the year and when that combines with all the exhaust from our vehicles it creates ground level ozone. And that’s when I started realizing, okay this is a really serious issue and a lot of people are being impacted by this. So that really motivated me to make some changes.

In this episode of Clean Power Planet we talk to Tim about how Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light helps churches get on board with the growing Creation Care movement.