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Clean EnergyInsightJim A. Roth

Roth: There are no words

By June 13th, 2022No Comments
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By Jim Roth, Director and Chair of the Firm’s Clean Energy Practice Group. This column was originally published in The Journal Record on March 7, 2016.


Jim Roth is a Director and Chair of the firm’s Clean Energy Practice.

Jim Roth is a Director and Chair of the firm’s Clean Energy Practice.

There are no words

There are no words to appropriately and fully describe the life and loss of my friend Aubrey McClendon. And there certainly isn’t a way, when a friend grieves, to provide comfort in 500 words as this column length limits.

So I will simply say: I am a better man because I knew you, Aubrey Kerr McClendon, and because I have the high honor of calling you my friend.

As a young man I came across a quote from Robert F. Kennedy, who said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?’”

This optimistic edict propelled me to pursue serving the public around me. And in all of my life, you are the only person who I’ve witnessed truly live this ideal every day, challenging the status quo to think far beyond their own selves and for the enormous benefit of millions of strangers. The world is different because you lived.

Thank you, Katie, for sharing so much of yourselves and your lives for the benefit of the world around you both. I wish you and your family the greatest of peace, strength and healing.

Rest in peace, friend.

Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma corporation commissioner, is an attorney with Phillips Murrah PC in Oklahoma City, where his practice focuses on clean, green energy for Oklahoma.

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