Expensive gas

That's natural gas, not gasoline. During the 1990s, the price of natural gas was roughly $3 per million BTUs. Sounds pretty cheap -- I mean, you get a whole million BTUs of natural gas, and it costs less than a Grande Cafe Mocha at Starbucks. But it turns out a BTU is a fairly small unit of measurement; if you run a single 100-Watt light bulb for three hours, it dissipates 1000 BTUs of energy.

At the $3 price, it was costing me about $90 a month to heat my apartment during the coldest months of the year. Then last year the price jumped to $6 per million BTUs, and my gas bill doubled. This past week, natural gas hit $12, and if it remains at this level when winter comes, I'll be feeling some pain.