This is a terrible article. I dug into the figures behind some of the claims made in the article and they seem a bit hyperbolic, for instance: >You don’t star

This is a terrible article. I dug into the figures behind some of the claims made in the article and they seem a bit hyperbolic, for instance: >You don’t start a wood bank in a country with functioning institutions. You start one when heating assistance programs can’t keep up, when the grid flickers every time the wind shifts, when propane and heating oil costs swing so hard that families can’t budget more than a week out. The linked articles cite a 8.4-16.4% price increase for natural gas, and a decrease of 4% and 5% for heating oil and propane respectively. While I understand some people might be living paycheck to paycheck, characterizing this as "costs swing so hard that families can’t budget more than a week out" is a stretch. At the very least the author could not mention "heating oil" when it decreased in price? Other parts of the article are equally misleading. For instance >Rural families don’t get to pretend. They know exactly what it means when the power goes out for the third time in a month and the utility company shrugs because the profit isn’t there to fix it. That gives you the impression that electricity companies are refusing to fix broken electricity grids, leaving people to freeze, but the first link is actually a story about people being disconnected after they don't pay their bills, and the second is about lack of maintenance for California's grid. Both are vaguely related to the original claim, but are cited in a highly misleading way. While it's regrettable that customers are disconnected for bill non-repayment, you obviously can't also have an utility operate where there's no consequences for non-payment. And while PG&E should be raked over the coals for their lack of maintenance, it's a stretch to link it to people in the north east freezing.