Why do I have a “Renewable Energy” category? After all, I’m supposed to be a designer/PM/artist/musician – what does renewable energy have to do with the price of an artistic web design project about tea in China?

Well, I believe it has a lot to do with the price of just about everything, both now and increasingly so in the future. Any modern economic activity requires a certain energy expenditure. Making a widget requires electricity for the widget factory. Extracting raw materials for the widget requires energy for exploration, mining, and refining. Transporting the widget of course requires fuel for your truck fleet, cargo shipping, etc. And so on down the line.

As the finite supply of non-renewable energy sources goes down and the cost goes up, so does the cost of everything that requires energy. Which amounts to basically everything that makes up modern civilization as we know it. Eventually these costs increase to the point where they become a drag on economic growth.

Since our economic system is fundamentally predicated on perpetual growth, growth is therefore a good thing to those of us that value things like jobs, projects, a stable society, and plenty of other things that we tend to take for granted.

Basically, it seems that something’s gotta give: Either we come up with renewable and sustainable sources of energy to fuel our growth-based economic system, or we scrap the growth-based system and replace it with some form of steady-state economics.

Unfortunately, all that adopting a steady-state system will do is delay the inevitable – non-renewables will simply run out later, rather than sooner.

Which is why I feel strongly about this topic, and feel that it rates a place among the top-level categories here.