I have been reading about the Iraq invasion and this story was particularly horrific. I created the post with the NSFW flag, but I removed the flag to comply with the community rules. There are no graphic images, but the text is difficult to read.

The Mahmudiyah rape and killings were a series of war crimes committed by five U.S. Army soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, involving the gang-rape and murder of 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her family on March 12, 2006. It occurred in the family’s house to the southwest of Yusufiyah, a village to the west of the city of Mahmoudiyah, Iraq. Other members of al-Janabi’s family murdered by American soldiers include her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhasen, 45-year-old father Qassim Hamza Raheem, and six-year-old sister Hadeel Qassim Hamza al-Janabi.[1] The two remaining survivors of the family, al-Janabi’s 9-year-old brother Ahmed and 11-year-old brother Mohammed, were at school during the massacre and orphaned by the event.

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

• Proponents will argue it’s about fairness and deterrence
• Lack of judicial discretion and a shift to prosecutorial power will end up with disproportionate punishments, while still allowing for discrimination