Several readers in the oil and gas business or in the financial sector have written to say that, heck yeah, you should worry about oil & gas. From one reader:

Jonah,
You should be worried about this hurricane and natural gas. If it does the kind of damage to Orleans parish that Ivan did where it struck, then we will RUN OUT of natural gas this winter. The current price is about 12 (up from an average of 9 last winter) and there are Call options trading now with a strike price of 30. That means investors expect a worst case scenario with Natural gas in the 35 to 40 range at it’s peak. If your home heating bill was 300 dollars last January, you can expect a bill as high as $1200 to $1400 this January. Screw gas prices, we can carpool….but how much will that last person pay to heat their house?