Americans can rest assured: the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) tells us there is no natural gas "crisis."
High prices? Forget it, they're just temporary, that's the way gas markets work.
Shortages, access problems? Nonsense, a mere figment of the imagination.
Thus NRDC, which in 2001 complained that "natural gas is not sufficiently clean," cautions us "not to overreact" to natural gas prices now at historical highs. We must remove our blinders to see that insidious forces are fabricating problems with natural gas as "an excuse to attack environmental safeguards on extracting and burning the fuel."
NRDC's curious view appears to be widely shared by environmentalists. U.S. PIRG refers to the "perceived" natural gas crisis-perceived by, say, manufacturers going bankrupt because of exorbitant energy costs? No, that can't be. This whole to-do is premised on exploitation of fear: "Industry and their supporters are taking advantage of fears of a natural gas shortage to get items from their wish list like exemptions from Clean Air Act standards and invasive exploration in protected waters."
FACT: There is a natural gas crisis, with serious short and long-term consequences, and environmental extremists, who have systematically blocked natural gas production, are a major cause of it.
In its recently released Short Term Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration projects that "natural gas spot prices are expected to average over $5 per thousand cubic feet for all of 2003, about 70 percent above the 2002 average." It also projects that, "Assuming normal weather, residential natural gas prices this heating season (October-March) are expected to be about 9 percent higher than last winter's average prices."
In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this summer, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said, "Today's tight natural gas markets have been a long time in coming and futures prices suggest that we are not apt to return to earlier periods of relative abundance and low prices anytime soon."
