CEO Column

By the time you read this the 4th of July will be on top of us. It is the most important and celebrated non-religious holiday in our country. Workers are off, grills are heated up, beaches are full, flags fly, and fireworks are shot. Celebrations go on all day and well into the night.

I spent my 13th summer with cousins in Cincinnati. It was my first time away from home and a great adventure. Also, my hometown, Corinth, Mississippi, was revamping its youth sports programs, and there was no baseball to keep me home that summer.

Twenty years ago, as electric cooperatives formed a national cooperative branding initiative that is now Touchstone Energy, extensive surveys and studies were performed to gauge people’s perceptions and values of electric service. I was surprised people assigned so little intrinsic value to a brand of electricity. The surveys indicated the only other product people associated so little value to product brand was common table salt (I always buy Morton’s, but I don’t know why).

This article was written the week after the failure of the Texas electric grid. Millions of customers had no power for days in freezing temperatures, and many that had power during the outage are now receiving power bills for thousands of dollars.

This month I offer a different format. None of this article is my content or opinion. The article is entirely composed of quotes from President Biden; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer; and Michael Shellenberger, a self-proclaimed environmental activist. President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Schumer should be familiar to you. Michael Shellenberger has been a

During the second and last Presidential Debate, President-Elect Joe Biden said if elected he would transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels. He pledged on the first day of his administration he “would sign a series of Executive Orders with unprecedented reach that go well beyond the Obama-Biden Administration platform and will put us on the right track on climate change.”

In September, The New York Times reported that President Xi Jinping sent a pointed message to the U.S. that China was tightening its climate targets to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

I have written about the Circle of Life a few times through the years in articles mainly focused on the deaths of my Dad and Mom and births of my grandchildren. Those articles discussed the expansion of our Circle of Life as we grow older and the intersection of our individual Circles with those of others as our lives became intertwined.

Two years ago, Hurricane Michael struck the northwest Florida coast near Panama City. The destruction was so complete I thought it would be months before basic electric, water or sewer services would be restored. I wondered if the area would ever be the same.

My childhood views on civil rights were framed by growing up in north Mississippi in the 1960s. My earliest memories of civil rights involve the Ole Miss race riots in 1962, Medgar Evers’ murder in 1962 and the murders of three civil rights activists during the Freedom Summer of 1964. As I matured, my views matured, as I read more about both sides of the issues. However, I am ashamed that I knew so little about John Lewis until he died in July.