Not as such, but let me make a couple of points that I think you might agree with.
First of all, volatility is bad for consumers; it creates all sorts of situations. For example, somebody who thought their heating price was going to be such and such for the coming winter finds out that all of a sudden it doubles, because they perhaps didn't take advantage of some of the options that are available to smooth that out. It's bad for our industry. There's no question about that. No one particularly likes volatility. The producers don't like volatility because somebody who was planning their drilling this season on the assumption of $7 or $8 gas is today looking at something under $4, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of idle rigs.
What can you do about it?
In the charts we've given you one of the things you'll see is the comparison between North American and European and Asian markets, and you'll see that the European and Asian markets are indeed less volatile than the North American. The reason for that is fairly straightforward. The European and Asian markets are heavily based on long-term contracts. There are historical reasons for that and also some cultural reasons. They are long-term contracts generally tied to oil.
A question we've raised with regulators on several occasions is whether we could have more latitude to enter into long-term contracts, particularly for liquefied natural gas. We think we need that kind of underpinning, and we believe that would have some effect on volatility. The ones who don't like those long-term contracts are the consumer intervenors in our regulatory processes, because the downside of that is that you can get locked into prices that may stay high rather than coming down with markets.
So you're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. As I say, in North America it is very much based on spot markets. It has worked very well for us up until recently. There are some sound arguments that we should be putting more long-term contracts in the mix.