by Robert Bryce at Robert Bryce Substack
On Thursday morning, I spoke to the Nebraska Rural Electric Association in Kearney. Before my speech, I chatted with my friend, Chet McWhorter, the general manager of the Cuming County Public Power District. Chet’s district, formed in 1936, delivers power to about 3,900 customers in northeastern Nebraska via some 1,200 miles of wire. The average cost of electricity in the CCPPD is $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, significantly less than the national average of about $0.12.
As I was talking to Chet, it occurred to me that his power district and the people I was talking to in Kearney, are about as far away as one can get from the COP 28 climate meeting that began on Thursday in Dubai. Yes, it may be possible to find spots on the globe that are more distant from Dubai than Kearney is, but the Nebraskans I spoke to are — from a political and cultural standpoint — galaxies away from the ecosystem inhabited by the people who will be at the Dubai climate confab. Agriculture dominates in Cuming County, which is a big producer of cattle, chickens, hogs, and corn. “We feed the world and pretty much ignore what’s happening everywhere else,” Chet told me.
Some 70,000 people are expected to attend the meeting in Dubai. That’s twice the number that attended COP27 last year in Egypt. The surging number of attendees shows that the business of climate change, is, well, a business. As my friend, Roger Pielke Jr., observed on Sunday:…
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