What YOU can do about climate change

• Scott LaMar
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott LaMar has worked in both radio and television for more than four decades.
  
  Currently, LaMar is the Host and Executive Producer of The Spark program on WITF-FM, 89.5 & 93.3 in Harrisburg, Pa.
  
  Previously, LaMar was WITF TV’s Sr. Public Affairs producer and produced the station’s award-winning weekly public affairs TV program, Smart Talk.
  
  In addition to his on-air duties, LaMar has moderated political candidate debates, including those for candidates running for Pennsylvania governor and the U.S. Senate and was a regular contributor to BBC World News TV before and after the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
  
  LaMar often emcees or moderates local events and has gone as far as California to emcee a national event.
  
  The American Society of Civil Engineers honored LaMar with their national Excellence in Journalism award in 2020. He has been nominated for five Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards.
  
  LaMar and The Spark have been recognized throughout the Central Pennsylvania community including ADVOZ Lancaster’s “Dignity in Dialogue Award”, the South-Central Assembly’s “Regional Citizen Award” and was named a “Humanitarian Hero” by The Humane Society of the United States/Pennsylvania.
  
  A native of Coatesville, Pa., LaMar has also worked as a broadcast news anchor, sports play-by-play announcer and manager.

Hand turning a thermostat knob to increase savings by decreasing energy consumption. Composite image between a hand photography and a 3D background.

Airdate: August 17th, 2023

 

We’re seeing the affects of climate change seemingly every day – whether it be wildfires in Hawaii or Canada or extreme weather like blistering heat waves around the world or storms that cause major damage and are life-threatening.

Often, we also hear what governments, policy makers, businesses and colleges and universities are doing to try to slow the progression of climate change. But what can YOU do?

StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Rachel McDevitt is writing a series of stories on ways that individuals can fight climate change and joined us on The Spark Thursday,”Home energy and electricity use make up an estimated 20% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a big source of our personal emissions. We have some control over how that works. I mean, your home, what you do in your home, that’s a big part of what you’re doing to generate possible emissions.”

McDevitt offered some energy saving tips,”Go around your house and see if your air is leaking from any place. Do you have older windows? Do you have doors that don’t seal very well when you close them? You can buy pretty cheap foam rolls of weather stripping. You can put that down so it minimizes air leaks. You can get a programmable thermostat. Some people may need some help installing those…But if you get a programmable thermostat, you can install it. There are lots of videos on YouTube and then you can set it so that you’re not cooling your house when you’re at work all day. Maybe you can put the temperature up to 80, 85 when you’re not at home and then you have it set to turn on that does cool down to like 75-72 by the time you do get home…So you’re not using energy that you don’t need, right? You can switch out all of your light bulbs for LEDs, which use very minimal amounts of power. Once you have LEDs it’s actually less important that you switch them off when you’re not using them because they use so little power. But the biggest things in your home that are going to be sucking up that energy are the the heating and air conditioning. So anything you can do to help them be more efficient, which would be sealing those air leaks and then not using them when you’re not at home, that’s going to cut down on your bills and it’s going to cut down on the emissions they generate.”

McDevitt said that often saving energy and money on your energy bills is a matter of changing habits.