Energy saving can save money and enhance the value of your home. Kenneth Harney in his syndicated column about real-estate reported recently that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is instituting a new type of energy efficient mortgage, offering 5% larger loans to people who plan to make energy efficiency improvements. He cites an example of a $300,000 FHA mortgage for a standard house, which under recent guidelines might be able to offer you 15,000% more up front if the extra money is used to lower the properties annual energy consumption. Saving energy not only saves money but enhances your property value…

Chapter 1: Is There Really an Energy Crisis?

 Not Fossil Fuel?

Just what are fossil fuels? The big three are oil, natural gas, and coal. There are other products derived from them, but they are the primary fossil fuels on which our economy runs and depends. The term fossil fuel refers to fuels originating from the remains of ancient plants and animals buried deep in the earth’s crust hundreds of millions of years ago, transformed into hydrocarbons by the earth’s heat and great pressure. They are not the result of dinosaurs dying and decaying as some suggest, but in the case of oil, they result from microscopic zooplankton deposited on ancient ocean floors. Coal is the result of plant matter from ancient forests being buried and subjected to great heat and pressure. Natural gas results from the same basic process, except that gas is the result of higher temperature and pressure. Gas is often found together with coal and oil. They all contain a mix of hydrogen and carbons in differing amounts and are therefore called hydrocarbons. Incomplete combustion of fossil fuels generates pollution, most of which is carbon dioxide (CO2). The hydrogen and carbon, when combined with oxygen, are what burns. Fossil fuels are finite commodities, and our use of them affects everything throughout our country and the world. Modern society can’t exist without them.  Unfortunately, one of these days they will be gone.