TABLE OF CONTENTS The pricing of natural gas as an energy commodity presents a number of features of historic significance. These historical elements relating to the politics and economics of the development of oil and gas resources are highly significant in their own right. Indeed, natural gas is playing an increasingly important role as an alternative to crude oil and the gasoline and numerous other by-products refined from petroleum. At the same time, a number of nonhistorical components also enter into the pricing of natural gas as an energy commodity. Some of these elements, especially those implicated in environmental pollution, have an intangible connection to gas pricing, although one would be hard-pressed to ferret out its exact contribution to consumers' expense. Appropriate intervention by the working engineer can do wonders for preserving the environment and all of us living in it from serious harm in the short term and the long term. Nothing including the most precious energy commodity, can have a higher value than human life, which forms the starting point of this chapter. Although natural approaches in general, and their usefulness for addressing environmental problems created by current energy development technologies and approaches in particular, are beyond the scope both of this chapter and of conventional concerns about gas pricing, throughout the rest of this chapter some of the obstacles that have been strewn along and throughout the various paths toward the goal of knowledgebased, all-natural, researched solutions to what some have called "our technological disaster" solutions that...
