Patrick J. Michaels testifies before the Committee of Natural Resources at the hearing “An Analysis of the Obama Administration’s Social Cost of Carbon”

because within a few days without electricity we would be killing each other.

Or just plain dying. I live in NC, which is actually one of the top three hurricane states (Florida, and maybe Texas, beat us out). The last category three that hit NC squarely was Fran. I spent a week in Durham without electricity, as it uprooted pin oaks over a meter thick, lifted them into the air, and twisted the power lines around them before dropping them down across the roads. They had to virtually rebuild the electrical grid from scratch down any semi-rural road. This was early fall, and it was still hot out — no air conditioning. No refrigeration — we had to throw out all of our perishable food (including from the freezers) within a day. We had hot water then (gas with a pilot light) and could cook on a gas grill outside (bic lighter) or on our gas stove ditto — but now we wouldn’t have that, because our tankless hot water heater requires electricity. I couldn’t even use my oven now — my gas stove requires electrical power to operate the oven. No lights but candles or oil lamps (we keep a few of the latter just in case). A few years later we had an ice storm in mid-winter that knocked out the power grid for five days. This time it was actively dangerous. No heat! No light at night, and early dusk and late dawn. No hot water. Almost impossible to cook (bless you gas stove!). Refrigeration still an issue, but less so because it was so cold outside.
In both cases, it wasn’t just us — food stores had no refrigeration, no lights. Deliveries were delayed and the stores ran out of key staples (and had a lot of difficulty taking money even then — now it would be impossible because money itself relies on electricity these days. The entire social fabric of most of NC dropped back to the early 19th century almost overnight. 19th century supply lines are literally incapable of supporting 21st century urbanization. If the outages had lasted more than a week, people would have actually gone hungry (and may have in some cases even in a week, but relief workers tried pretty hard to rescue the elderly and poor).
Sometime — this year, next year, in ten years, in 100 years — we will have another Coronal Mass Ejection like the solar storm of 1859:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
This “Carrington Event” was the largest geomagnetic storm ever observed, to this date. There was so much magnetic energy that:

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks.[8] Telegraph pylons threw sparks.[9] Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.[10}

That was low voltage telegraphs with comparatively short runs. This event lasted over 24 hours, long enough for the entire world to experience incredible auroras to the equator, electrical shocks, and a night that never properly got dark.
If this event were to occur today — and it lasted 24 hours — it would blow every electrical grid on the planet. Every single major transformer would be fried, most of them irreversibly broken. It would shut down the electrical energy delivery system worldwide. Microelectronics are very susceptible to overvoltage — every cell phone, every tower, every radio, every TV — it it was plugged in, it would be toast. Think electromagnetic pulse (like the one produced by a nuclear bomb) that does not end powered by the big bomb that is the sun.
We would wake up with the world dropped back to the mid-19th century overnight, but with the needs for food production and distribution associated with huge 21st century urban enclaves. Nothing would move — it is possible that the CME would even fry the alternator of cars and trucks, although the engine compartments might be an adequate faraday cage so maybe not — but either way gas pumps are electric so within a day or two there would be no more gasoline. There would be no money — only cash would work and who carries much of that any more?
Within hours, people would start to die who would not have died otherwise. Hospitals are not equipped with operating rooms and anesthesia delivery systems that can function without electricity. People, especially the poor, would run out of food and local stores would be stripped and not resupplied. There would be looting, martial law, and a general breakdown of social order. And it would not stop! It might take a year or even longer to rebuild the entire distribution system, longer if the CME blew out the actual generator coils themselves. Every major generator or transformer coil might need to be remanufactured as the CME pulse would cause an inductive surge that shorted out the coils internally and fused the shorts. The industrial infrastructure that makes those coils would itself be affected and would have to be bootstrapped, perhaps using military-grade, EMP hardened portable power.
That’s what life without the grid would be like. One single event like this and people would lynch anybody that threatened their electrical supply, because I’m guessing at least a billion people would die before it was over, of starvation, sudden war, breakdown of medical services, violent crime, and social unrest (read — rioting and looting). Most of this would happen in the cities, with the worst of it in the biggest cities. We survived a week of it, because we had plenty of food, working cars, because there was still electricity in some parts of town, because the stores worked hard to remain open and because there was still a cash economy. A month of it? A year? Without any outside of the affected area that continued to function normally to provide emergency relief and replacement parts for the destroyed infrastructure — I dunno. One is back to Alas! Babylon! nuclear war scenarios without the radioactive cities — the complete breakdown of social and economic order.
Me, I like my electricity, and don’t have a survivalist retreat where I can easily regress to Walden Pond and shoot my own deer and raise my own hogs and get by. But one of many, many things to worry about is that our entire electrical supply is not only vulnerable to political predation and global warming hysteria, it is vulnerable to a number of extrinsic risks that could take down all of it (CMEs!) or part of it (EMP bombs, nuclear war, very directed terrorism, economic collapse in general). And the one thing that separates us from kerosene lamps and cooking our beans and rice over a wood fire if at all is electricity!
rgb

Hey RGB,
Hurricane Ivan in 2004 brought tropical storm warnings to western North Carolina. More people were killed here in NC than in Florida where the storm made landfall. There was widespread flooding,even in downtown Asheville. Many NC mountain counties received 12-18 inches of rain and big wind. But we are likely more hardy than some folks, say those poor lambs in New Orleans with Katrina.
I’ve seen 5 feet of snow on the blue ridge parkway in March! Asheville, NC power was out in spots for 10 days. My wife’s grandmother refused to leave her home. She boiled eggs and coffee over a candle. No FEMA, national guard, nada – just friends and family. Folks could have used a hand. Without power those most vulnerable are in real trouble real fast.