“The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.” Michael Shellenberger, Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” wrote this commentary in an article in Forbes . According to Shellenberger, president at Environmental Progress and an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), renewables are simply incapable of sustaining our current way of life. Why? Because people just are not willing to give up all the perks of modern life in order to return to some kind of a romantic pre-industrial era—the only kind of era that renewables could hope to sustain. Climate change and the pivot toward energy transition are real. But the idea of having the world function as we know it powered solely by renewable energy is unrealistic today. It will likely still be unrealistic three decades from now. […]