Rick Mattoon of the Chicago Fed and I are the author’s of the Chicago Fed Letter, October issue, and the topic is natural gas policy and implications for the Upper Midwest region. Regular readers of TKP and Tech Central Station are familar with my analyses of natural gas policy, and this letter reiterates some of it and combines it with valuable insights from Rick on the regional implications of high and/or volatile natural gas prices. One interesting thing you see in Table 1 is how much our region uses natural gas for home heating and cooking relative to the US average.