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President George W. Bush was neither the first nor will he be the last person to cite America’s “addiction” to oil. Just two years before that State of the Union speech, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote, “Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.”

In parts one and two of this series, we compared gold to Hostess Twinkies (similar in color and indestructibility) and to McDonald’s Big Macs (indicative of relative currency values across international borders).

We concluded that gold can make sense as a defensive investment because “its true value is its ability to store value.” In times of exceptional financial uncertainty, one may deem it prudent to devote a small investment allocation to the only investment literally as good as gold. But how does one buy gold?

Recently, both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report mocked the stage-managed hysteria of fear-mongering talk show hosts. The celebrity pundits warn of apocalyptic scenarios in which gold will be the only available currency, then appear in commercials for companies buying and selling gold. Of course, if they really believe their doomsday predictions, promoting gold is no conflict of interest, but the Comedy Central satirists suspect more cynical motives.

Valuable as they may have been 2,000 years ago, you don’t hear much about Frankincense and Myrrh in the financial press these days. Gold, on the other hand, remains an important player in global financial markets. Why is this?

Anyone with a backyard vegetable garden can appreciate how difficult it would be to grow enough food to feed a family of four year-round. Subsistence farming is hard, and subsistence farmers often starve.

During Questar CEO Keith Rattie’s April, 2009, address at Utah Valley University, he laid out seven suggestions for addressing the energy and environmental challenges facing the world in general and the United States in particular.

The first three invite little controversy: Rattie says we must improve energy efficiency, stop wasting energy, and find ways to conserve energy. Whether in our daily purchase decisions or our national policy choices, we can all do more with what we’ve got.

Addressing students of Utah Valley University on April 2, 2009, Questar Corporation Chairman, President and CEO Keith Rattie tried to put into perspective the scope of the world’s rapidly rising demand for energy: “The magnitude of that challenge becomes even more daunting when you consider that of the 6.2 billion people on the planet today, nearly two billion people don’t even have electricity – never flipped a light switch.”

Sometimes we strain so hard to see distant solutions that we overlook ideas right in front of us – or right below us.

While Americans passionately debate how to lessen our dependence on foreign oil and develop renewable energy sources that reduce CO2 emissions, an interesting discovery should be changing the discussion: Enormous new reserves of clean natural gas have been discovered right here in America.

Two interesting articles about Wall Street and the banking crisis appeared recently. A story headlined “It Wasn’t Me” in the October 10th issue of The Economist suggests that instead of declaring banks “too big to fail,” we should recognize such institutions as “too big to run.”

How should investors react to the fact that Pfizer (PFE) recently pled guilty to illegal marketing of its products and settled with the Justice Department for $2.3 billion? The settlement included the largest criminal fine in Justice Department history. One reason for the large fine is that Pfizer is a repeat offender; the company was caught illegally marketing other drugs in 2004.