Peach Tree Times

Natural gas prices are rising significantly, increasing the costs for consumers to heat their homes.

Now that winter is approaching and temperatures are dropping, Americans are turning on their heating systems to keep warm. They will be in for a rude awakening when the first bill arrives as natural gas and propane prices have increased by 89% and nearly 300%, respectively, according to Trading Economics.

According to the International Energy Agency, an organization that advises governments on energy policy, natural gas prices have reached a 13-year high, The Providence Journal reported. Rob Thummel, an investment manager focusing on energy at Tortoise Capital, predicted that if temperatures remain around average this winter, heating bills will increase by 50-75%, according to The Providence Journal.

According to Choose Energy, Georgia now has the second-highest cost of natural gas in the country, after prices have climbed by 12.9% in just one month.

In what they deemed the “inflation tax” the Wall Street Journal editorial board said that “workers are paying the price” for increased costs since “real hourly earnings are down 1.9% since January.”

“Natural gas market prices are higher due to the economic recovery from strong natural gas demand from last winter, along with slower-than-anticipated production this year,” Richard Meyer, vice president, energy markets, analysis, and standards at the American Gas Association, said.

Steven M. Teles, Samuel Hammond, and Daniel Takash authored a September 2021 paper wherein they acknowledged that while “[s]oaring costs have blown a hole in the budgets of the working and the middle classes, offsetting the full benefits of a growing economy” some of the solutions proposed by progressive politicians such as “simply socializing the costs and blowing an equally large hole in the federal debt is not a sustainable alternative.”

Teles, Hammond and Takash found that “the root cause of escalating costs is overwhelmingly regulatory, rather than budgetary,” and that “shifting costs onto the public would not only fail to fix the underlying problem; it could also make cost disease substantially worse” resulting in a “vicious cycle in which subsidies for supply-constrained goods or services merely push up prices, necessitating greater subsidies, which then push up prices, ad infinitum.”

According to Forbes, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted that propane expenditures will rise by 54%, heating oil by 43%, natural gas by 30% and electricity by 6%. Dan Eberhart, CEO of oilfield services company Canary, said in a commentary in Forbes that because of inflation on groceries and other commodities, consumers will have less to spend on their home heating bills. He also said that the rising energy costs will affect the deliveries of goods and increase inflation.