For years I’ve considered investors and executives in the fossil fuel industry to be lazy and stupid. They could make more money in the long term with clean energy, and yet they entrench themselves in their ways and opt to poison our discourse and slow down human progress.

I apologize if this thought experiment is messy. I got out of the shower with these thoughts and started writing. To separate clean energy from renewable energy, I will define the following:

• Renewable items can be “farmed” on demand, using natural processes that exist on the planet
• Non renewable items are created slowly, at a fixed rate, and cannot be created on demand. This includes fossil fuels and precious metals.

Those entrenched in fossil fuels oppose the alternatives that take away their power. Since fossil fuels are extractive and non renewable items, there exists a fixed amount of it on the planet. There is value and power from controlling this scarce resource.

Renewable energy can be created on demand by anyone with the means to do so. Solar and wind energy cannot be monopolized as both can be harvested planet wide by anyone with the resources to set up a “farm”.

In an alternate universe, if it was possible to harvest and store energy in the form of oil and gas, it would not be as attractive. Likewise, if it was possible to limit access to wind or sunlight, the rich and powerful would have an incentive to do that.

If people can recognize this difference, they will be more likely to ignore fossil fuel talking points and not act against their own self interest