Where we are

People are spending significantly more money on energy than they need to be. A lot of this is because it's hard to see just how much energy usage is costing us. There is also a lot of misunderstanding about how to properly calculate the actual amount of money that an investment in efficiency will take and how long it will take to pay back.

The average American household spends over $1800 a year on energy in their homes, split between the different fuel types seen below. This is in addition to costs of gasoline for Transportation or other fuels for travel (such as plane or boat). This also doesn't include the costs of transporting your food and your things. Nor does it include the energy costs of the industrial processes that go into producing food or stuff. When you buy an ear of corn, you aren't just paying the farmer for growing the corn, you're paying the steel producer who kept hot ovens running to make the material for the tractors on the farm and you're helping to pay for the energy used by a factory to make the fertilizer poured on the fields.

The same goes for all of the things that you buy and then dispose of. How much of your income is spent on buying products that you no longer own or use 6 months later? Buying "green" products that have lower energy contents, recyclable materials, or repairing and reusing materials isn't just about helping out the environment, it could also reduce the amount of money you spend.