I’m looking out the window and the first snow of the season is falling.  The flakes are nearly as large as the tip of my thumb; they’re slushy and coming down hard and fast.  It’s early November and the snow bespeaks the promise of a long, hard winter.  The Farmer’s Almanac on my kitchen table suggests as much – a winter colder and wetter than average.

The one thing the Farmer’s Almanac didn’t predict is probably the single-most important thing in our lives these days – the fact that this will be the first winter in modern history where hundreds of thousands or millions of people could literally freeze to death in their homes.  I know that may sound strange.  Given all of the modern conveniences of the twenty-first century, how in the world could the majority of citizens of the northernUnited Statesbe at risk of freezing to death?

Technically…