I always thought of "renewable" as just used to distinguish forms of power generation that relied on processes that already occur, unlike oil and gas that exist but need to be extracted and processed to create usable energy, we have solar, wind and hydro that take adva tage of sources of energy that we simply intercept. Like a solar panel generating energy from the light that's already hitting the spot that we installed the panel, the wind turbine that's generating energy from the wind that's already blowing, etc.

That may not be strictly true (im vaguely remembering secondary school geography lessons), but thats how i tend to distinguish them

It seems like ben is relying on word play to create a fallacy to confuse the meaning of renewable, which oil and gas are not.

Even if you look at it from the perspective of is a resource finite, which technically everything is, oil is going to run out an insurmountable amount of time before the wind stops blowing.