I remembered reading in Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle” about a tribe he encountered in Tierra del Fuego called the Yaghan, who wore few clothes and by all reports were comfortable, despite living in a region where the annual mean temperature is 42 degrees. If the Yaghan could do it scantily clothed, couldn’t I do it well clothed? I did the obvious thing, and put on fingerless gloves and a hat. And after just a few days, a colder-than-normal house seemed, well, normal. I decided to go colder.

The lowest the thermostat would go was 45 degrees, which I figured was good because I had to make sure the pipes wouldn’t freeze. At first it was fairly unpleasant. I wore two pairs of wool socks, thermal underwear, a thin pair of pants, sweatpants, a wool shirt, a sweatshirt, a light hoodie, a light jacket, a big poofy winter jacket, two winter hats and those fingerless gloves. Yet I was still having trouble typing because of my numb hands. That’s when I pulled out my down sleeping bag, and decided to wear it whenever I was sitting. With the sleeping bag, now that my core had been warmed, my extremities were warming up, too.

Life at 45 degrees isn’t for everyone — I wouldn’t recommend it for the sick, the elderly or children. And there are, of course, legitimate hazards to the cold. The National Weather Service reports that there were 66 cold- and winter-related deaths in 2013 in the United States. A more useful measurement, popular in Europe, is “excess winter mortality,” which simply compares deaths during winter to those during the rest of the year. The resulting figures tend to be much higher than the weather service’s: In England and Wales there were an estimated 31,100 such deaths in the 2012-13 winter.

Using this measure, paradoxically, warmer countries like Spain and Portugal suffer more cold-related deaths than colder countries, because they aren’t as well versed in the art of keeping warm. The Siberian city of Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world, has an average temperature of minus 16 from October to March, yet experiences no excess winter deaths. Scandinavians, who also have a low excess winter mortality rate, have a common saying: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.”

I’m not going to say that I liked living in a 45-degree house, but eventually I didn’t mind it, and it taught me that one’s sense of comfort can be redefined with a bit of grit and resourcefulness. Sitting in my sleeping bag, I began to wonder: If we all set our thermostats to our own “comfortable low,” how many West Virginia mountains could we save? How many fewer wells would need to be fracked? How much less greenhouse gas would we emit?