Only in this totally nuts country can the low price of natural gas not be a positive. We have so much of this stuff and we have so many ways to use it that aren't being used that it is disgraceful.
We are headed to $1 natural gas in this country. The rest of the world is headed to $18. The differential is amazing. The rest of the world is clamoring for our natural gas, but our administration hasn't been able to figure out a single way to make it work for us. There's no encouragement to get trucks to switch from dirty imported diesel, and no mandates like those we had for ethanol, even as ethanol jacks up the price of precious food and uses a humongous amount of water. Ethanol is a scourge to this nation and natural gas is a blessing, but it doesn't matter.
Here's the real crime. I was perfectly fine with the Keystone pipeline being blocked if we simultaneously said, "We don't need dirty Canadian crude to run our cars we can use our own natural gas until the cost of electric cars come down and utilities switch to natural gas from coal over the next few years when the coal plants' lives expire."
Nope. Nothing. We just said, "Canada, go send your oil to Asia, will you? We don't want it. We want to import oil from Venezuela and the Middle East."
And that is exactly what we are doing.
You can't own any of the natural gas stocks unless you are in them for takeovers, and I am not going to endorse anything on a takeover basis when the fundamentals are coming up short.
But you could, if, in November, Mitt Romney wins.
These stocks are now binary. If Obama wins, they are perma-shorts.
Romney? You want to go buy them if you had certainty.
Right now, though, if there is any certainty, it's that the economy will improve and Obama will win, which means that this disgrace continues.
Sorry, I had to get that off my chest because I am so steamed that we rejected Keystone without a solution that would have brought down the price of gasoline, busted OPEC, given us a better trade balance and, of course, put hundreds of thousands of people to work.
Nope: it's fossil. Not going to happen.
