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Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Wednesday, October 19th. I'm Nyla Boudou. Here's what

you need to know today. Americans are buying and wasting less food. But first, preparing for an

expensive winter in the U.S. and a brutal one in Ukraine. The price of staying warm. That's today's

one big thing. You can expect higher heating bills this winter than last. Nearly half of American households

use natural gas to heat their homes. In this winter, the energy, information and administration

says the average bill will be $931. That's almost a 30% increase from last year. The likely spike has

to do with Russia's war in Ukraine. Axios's markets correspondent Matt Phillips is here to explain

more. Hey, Matt. Hey, how are you? Matt, so natural gas prices have gone down recently. Why are we

still expecting to have such an expensive winter heating our homes? Well, they've gone down recently,

but over this year, they're still up almost 60%. That's largely because Russia has effectively been

cut out of the global economy as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. That's pushed global prices up.

It's drawn a lot of U.S. natural gas to Europe in the form of liquefied natural gas. While we don't get

a lot of natural gas directly from Russia, hardly any, it's this global impact on the global market

that is, in effect, raising American heating bills, too. How is Washington in the Biden

administration planning to handle this? A 30% increase is fairly significant for a lot of people,

especially when we think about inflation and all the other price pressures people are facing.

Well, we've seen this kind of full court press to try to get large global producers to boost

production. That's had sort of mixed results. I mean, the president went to Saudi Arabia earlier

...