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It's more than transportation. "Heating oil" is basically diesel and is affected by these prices. Winter is about to hit the Northeast and many people still heat with it. To fill up my tank today would be around $1200 and I will be expecting to refill it every 40-60 days for the next six months.

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I assume these are places with no natural gas infrastructure? I finally convinced my mom to convert from oil to gas, even though she has a somewhat irrational fear of gas, based just on the cost. She'll break even on the cost of the new furnace within a couple years. The cost difference between the fuels is significant.

Yep. In New England [1] roughly 2,000,000 households heat via "heating oil" or kerosene (which is more expensive). There are slightly more folks that heat with natural gas, but this is a rural vs suburban divide and New England is quite rural overall.

Heat pumps are in vogue now but usually they are supplemented with fireplaces, wood stoves or pellet stoves.

[1] https://www.mass.gov/service-details/how-massachusetts-house...

I've lived in South Texas my entire life, so my winter experience is pretty limited (though I got quite the crash course in February 2021 along with most of the state), but I see lots of talk about modern heating systems the world over preparing for the coming winter in a time of energy shortage, and I just think about how these places have been inhabited since before industrialization and I wonder how?

I suppose the question that I have is what has modernity done to us? Are people just used to a comfort standard that is getting less achievable (I'd be pretty miserable in summer without HVAC myself), or is this a life and death issue that people are no longer able live in warm enough shelter to survive?

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