turn on the heat

“We dare not turn on the heat overnight — after using it for five or six hours, the gas stops again,” Mr. Li, a 45-year-old grocer, said by telephone from his home in northern China’s Hebei Province.

His priority is to repair critical infrastructure to ensure the city is ready to turn on the heat when winter arrives, no small feat given the extent of the damage and how expensive energy has become.

Within a collapsed cloud of stellar debris — a gaseous solar nebula and likely the remnants of a dead supernova —our proto-sun started to turn on the heat.

Standing back from the crowd, Bruno Cécillon, a longtime Green supporter, acknowledged that “people are worried” because “they won’t be able to live as peacefully as they used to, to take their car, turn on the heat, put on the air conditioning without second thoughts.”

“This past February when the electricity grid failed and millions of fellow Texans were without power, which meant that the lights wouldn’t turn on, the heat wouldn’t run, and pretty soon their pipes froze and the water stopped flowing, they were abandoned by those who are elected to serve and look out for them,” Mr. O’Rourke said.