Not only is Hurricane Katrina a tragic human disaster, it is also an important economic story.
Apart from causing possibly hundreds of deaths and lots of heartache, one of the most powerful hurricanes in US history forced energy companies in the Gulf of Mexico to close more than a tenth of US refining capacity and a quarter of its oil output.
Oil prices were already under pressure from high global demand - particularly from China - when Katrina tore into the coastal areas of Lousiana and Mississippi. Now prices are well above $70 a barrel amid fears that they are heading for $80.
For Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, the impact of Katrina on oil prices could be devastating.
"Depending on what we learn in the next few days, this could be the biggest oil supply shock since the 1970s. We are now in the days of reckoning," Yergin told the Wall Street Journal.
Some commentators, however, argue that high oil prices will have a beneficial impact.
Eberhard Rhein, writing in the International Herald Tribune, says market forces - through high prices - have achieved in a few months what 10 years of negotiations under the Kyoto protocol have failed to do: a reduction in energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.
Rhein attributes a 10% drop in petrol consumption in Belgium and Germany - and presumably in many other countries - in the first half of the year to the rise in petrol prices. Like other commentators, Rhein believes that higher oil prices will lead to higher investment in new energies and energy saving devices.
But all that lies some way down the road. For now, higher petrol prices are the last thing George Bush needs. The US president's approval ratings have fallen to 45%, his lowest yet, in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. What may have pushed his overall ratings down in the latest poll is pervasive dissatisfaction over soaring petrol prices, the Post says.
Katrina could make life even more difficult for Bush if prices go up. Some may see poetic justice in this. Bush has been pretty resistant to the idea that there is link between global warming - climate change is the president's preferred term - and economic activity.
For Ross Gelbspan, also writing in the IHT, the president shouldn't be. The author of The Heat is On, Gelbspan argues that a warming atmosphere is generating more droughts, more intense downpours, more frequent heat waves and more severe storms - including Katrina.
"Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off southern Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the high sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico," he writes.
He goes on to lambast the US press for failing to educate the American public to the dangers of global warming, partly because of heavy lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. Gelbspan's somewhat hyperbolic verdict is that "the press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the oil and coal industries".
