Well, the energy markets are full of hungry traders waiting with bated breath for every stock report - which will be showing up each week all through the winter. I'm sure one can track the number of degree-days so far this winter many times a day somewhere. If stocks start to deplete too much, traders will bid the price higher and higher until the right number of households and companies have folded and figured out how to save some NG. The amount of political jawboning and education efforts will go up in line with prices. Thermostats will be lowered, rooms will be closed up, woodstoves will be installed, industrial production will close down and be replaced with imports from competitors, etc, etc. Again, we only need to save a few percent. If we had to save 10-15%, that would be a true crisis. I don't believe this is (unless something else happens). Let's save some of our rhetorical range for the true crises when they come.

It looks like a crisis to the CEO of Dow Chemical because he needs to move most of his operations to somewhere with more NG, which is understandably very inconvenient for him and even more so for his employees. He'd like to persuade the rest of us to conserve more so he doesn't have to do that. But I'm not panicked by his rhetoric yet. "Peak North American Disposable Diapers" -- oh the horror of it -- I believe we can survive with nothing worse than a faint smell (albeit it will be a few more notches on the trade deficit which seems like it's going to keep getting worse).

The very good thing is it's raising awareness a little bit ahead of the NG depletion curve.

The big worry, to me, is there might be just as many bad hurricanes in the GoM in the next few years as there have been in the last few.