You may not have noticed, but different classes of people have different levels of worth to our society, and to those who seek to influence policy.  I think that this was brought home to me anew by reading Jeremy Leggett's new book The Empty Tank - Oil, Gas, Hot Air and The Coming Global Financial Catastrophe.  In seeking to create a sense of the coming crisis he writes (page 62)

In Finland, a somewhat colder country than Britain, the toll of people freezing to death in their own homes in a typical year is precisely zero.  The annual toll from hypothermia deaths in British homes, on average, approaches 50,000. Tens of thousands of grans and granddads dying who wouldn't have died if they lived in the land of Father Christmas with a little insulation in their homes!

 Now I am not sure where he got that number, a quick Google search led me to a site that gives the total hypothermia deaths in the USA in 1999 as 598, with it being a contributing cause in 1,139. These numbers are considered, however, to be considerably under-reported. In either case it raises a level of concern. There is a long article in US News and World Report that brings this situation home to the United States.  There has been an increasing trend to fuel new construction of power stations with oil and natural gas.  However, as the article points out, there is no mandate that a company use that fuel to generate power.

Deregulated natural-gas-fired power generators, under no legal obligation to serve customers as the old monopoly electric companies were, can simply stop generating power. Some plants will be interruptible customers with no backup fuel source. But in other cases, power plants that have firm natural gas contracts will stop generating electricity anyway and sell their fuel at enormous profit. That is precisely what happened during the three-day January 2004 cold snap, when more than 25 percent of New England's generating capacity went off line and the reserve margin was near zero.