There Are No Winners in a War Against Winter

By Justin Duyao

December 24th, 2022: All morning, I watched a hummingbird trying to drink from a frozen feeder. From the window of my parent’s cozy kitchen, I watched it flutter to its perch, try in vain to find a meal, and then fluff its feathers in frustration. I brought the feeder in several times to warm it up, but returning it outside in the middle of our ice storm was futile. The bird would almost certainly die that night. 

The Trouble with Winter 

The day I wrote this first paragraph, there was a snowstorm in Buffalo, New York. They called it a “once-in-a-generation” storm, which made me laugh when I first heard it. Anything to keep my parents glued to the sofa, hypnotized by the 24-hour news cycle, I thought. But by the time the storm passed, 25 people had died. Today, it numbers nearly 50. I don’t think anyone is laughing. 

In its wake, this year’s cold front—which stretched across 37 states, dipping as far south as the Texas/Mexico border—left hundreds of thousands without power, stranded motorists on the road and travelers in airports, effectively upending our expectations for winter storms. 

“There is nothing more I want other than their safety right now,” said Lia Belles, whose 85-year-old grandmother was trapped in her car on New York State Route 198. According to CNN, Belles had tried and failed several times to reach her family on foot. “Conditions by myself were just impossible.” 

Images of homes encased in thick layers of ice filled my newsfeed. They felt post-apocalyptic, like something an artist had rendered to depict long-abandoned houses, swallowed up by an endless winter. And yet, somehow, this storm is nothing compared to the 2021 winter storm that slammed Texas, overwhelming the state’s power grid and leaving millions freezing in the dark. In total, the “worst natural disaster in the state’s history” left 246 people across 77 counties dead, with victims ranging from less than 1 year old to 102 years old, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. 

To me, these statistics sound like war-time casualty counts. And, in a way, they are. 

Bitter Cold as a Weapon of War

In November of 2022, at the same time that Gov. Greg Abbott called on Texans to reduce their electricity usage, Russia was in the middle of a targeted attack on Ukraine’s power grid.

“Doing that when we enter winter demonstrates that President Putin is now trying to use the winter as a weapon of war,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters. 

Even as millions evacuated the country to avoid an inevitably deadly winter, in December last year, 10 million Ukrainians—a quarter of the population—were without power. Meanwhile, temperatures reportedly dropped as low as negative four degrees Fahrenheit, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). By early December 2022, more than half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been destroyed. 

“WHO has so far verified 703 attacks on health since the war began nine months ago,” said Dr. Hans Henri P. Kulge, regional director of WHO Europe. “This is a breach of international humanitarian laws and the rules of war.” 

Of course, this is not the first time Russia has weaponized winter in an attempt to demoralize its enemies. In his study of “General Frost” or “General Winter”—both handy personifications of the consistently harsh winters in Russia—historian Allen F. Chew concluded that the bitter Russian cold acted as a “substantial contributing factor” to the failures of both Napoleon and Hitler’s invasions of Russia. 

According to several accounts of the latter case, the negative-40-degree temperatures were brutal for Russian and German camps alike. Considering Russia was on the defensive, however, it gave them ample time to dig trenches, reinforce defenses, and push the underequipped Germans back from Moscow. Many historians agree that, if the weather had been on Hitler’s side, things would have turned out much differently.

In many ways, the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia seems to echo similar themes. Even though Russia is the invading party in this case, cold weather has significantly slowed the tempo of the war—to Russia’s benefit. On one front, Ukraine’s electrifying counter-attacks that characterized October and November have slowed, though they have not stopped, due to the notorious Eastern European “season of mud,” which has the same effect on troop movement, today, that it had over a century ago. 

On another front, the struggles of ordinary Ukrainians as a result of Russian bombardment have undermined the morale of the wider Ukrainian effort. If anything, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Congressional address in late December, insisting that “Ukraine is alive and kicking,” may hint that they still have significant difficulties to overcome before the pace of the war can pick up again in the Spring.

A New Front for Winter Wars

Putin isn’t the only powerful force in the world that takes advantage of the extremities of winter. 

In February of 2021—smack in the middle of their electricity crisis—Texas saw the largest percentage increase in average electricity bills since 2008. For consumers, energy bills rose nearly 50%, from ~$541 in February 2020 to ~$1,050 in 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. Because electricity bills are based on how much electricity customers use, higher demand is often mirrored by higher prices. It didn’t help that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended the world’s energy market around the same time. However, while many everyday Texans bore the weight of skyrocketing energy prices, Texas-based oil and gas companies benefited greatly from these price hikes. 

“I grew up in Odessa in the middle of oil and gas,” said Carrie Collier-Brown, a lawyer for the Alliance for Retail Markets, a trade group for Texas electric providers. “For folks out there, there’s always been this inverse relationship.” 

While the winter war in Ukraine rages on, the fact remains that nearly three-quarters of Americans get energy from utilities owned by investors and run for profit. For the U.S. residents that pay the price of utility rate hikes on a regular basis, the question who “wins” and who “loses” the war against winter is a given. The households forced to decide between basic human needs—food versus electricity, water versus healthcare, shelter versus internet—are disproportionately Black, brown, and indigenous.

The fact is that winters aren’t going to get any milder—not for soldiers in Bakhmut, and certainly not for U.S. families that have been struggling with energy insecurity for generations. Though it may seem counterintuitive, a warming planet evaporates more water into the atmosphere, causing record-breaking floods in warmer months and generating deadly winter storms when temperatures drop. The question isn’t whether or not this war will end anytime soon, but rather for whom are we going to fight.

Jean Su, Energy Justice Director at the Center for Biological Diversity, argues that there is only one real solution to this problem. In short, “the United States must confront the failings of its private monopoly energy system and establish new models of accountable public ownership.” 

Su is one of many climate researchers, legislators, and activists that advocate for an “energy democracy,” or, in other words, “the kind that refuses to commodify a basic human right and serves the public’s best interest in the age of our climate emergency and devastating racism.” 

Writing for Intelligencer, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls for “an energy transition rooted in energy democracy would mean taking on the energy corporations on a large scale: replacing investor-owned utilities with publicly owned, democratically run alternatives.” Meanwhile, the Just Transition Listening Project notes that a better, more democratic transition to an energy economy would “attend to local conditions” and “be rooted in the needs and aspirations of workers, unions, and disproportionately impacted communities.”

Looking ahead, there is no room for error. The longer state and federal government agencies waiver in their commitment to climate justice, the more people will die. For those of us who, today, sit comfortably in well-heated homes, we shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by the ever-looming climate crisis that’s bigger and more brutal than any enemy we could face on the battlefield: We should feel lucky to be alive and kicking—for now—and stand, collectively, alongside those who are struggling to do the same. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Justin Duyao (he/him) is a contributing editor at HereIn Journal. As a San Diego-based art writer, he is the recipient of a Make | Learn | Build grant from Oregon's Regional Arts and Culture Council, as well as a writing fellowship from the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA. His art writing has been published by Oregon ArtsWatch, Variable West, the San Diego Union-Tribune, HereIn Journal, Vanguard Culture, and Southwest Contemporary. 

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