Modern

“Damn the fundamentals; full speed ahead!” as the Civil War’s Admiral David Farragut might have said if asked to analyze the modern-day spot gas market. A smidgen of heating load in parts of Canada and the northern U.S., along with a wee bit of cooling demand from the desert Southwest through the western end of the South, did little to explain rising prices across the board Monday.

“Damn the fundamentals; full speed ahead!” as the Civil War’s Admiral David Farragut might have said if asked to analyze the modern-day spot gas market. A smidgen of heating load in parts of Canada and the northern U.S., along with a wee bit of cooling demand from the desert Southwest through the western end of the South, did little to explain rising prices across the board Monday.

The place many consider the birthplace of the modern U.S. environmental movement, California’s Santa Barbara County, is considering changing its decades-long opposition to renewed offshore drilling along its stretch of Pacific coast, about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The five-member county Board of Supervisors Tuesday will consider writing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask for a change of state policy against drilling.