solarpunk memes

The vast majority of human history operated 100% renewable.

I think that depends on what you mean by history and what you mean by renewable. There is evidence that prehistoric civilizations caused lasting effects on the world around us, from mass extinction events caused from human expansion (see North American megafauna), including extinction of our closest cousins (other lines of homo sapiens, and other species of the homo genus), whenever our settlements encountered theirs.

Once agriculture came on the scene, ancient civilizations were modifying the land, domesticating animals, developing pottery and tools and making use of both renewable and non-renewable resources. With the rise of the bronze age, mining and other permanent resource extraction became the norm.

Plenty of what these ancient civilizations were doing were not sustainable or renewable. Almost every ancient civilization caused deforestation soon after developing agriculture. Plenty of societies relied on mining in an unsustainable way, exhausting the forests of fuel.

So if we're starting with "history" being human civilization and settlements in the neolithic era, I don't think that's quite right. Even if you're only talking prehistoric homo sapiens, there's still evidence that we caused mass extinctions before we developed agriculture.

Of course, we did allow for a lot of reforestation, replenishment, and other rehabilitation of the land at times, but often that was not by choice of humans. Disease, war, natural disaster, and famine could cause major population collapse in a way that caused settlements to be abandoned, but that isn't really what people mean by a renewable practice.

That's a flawed comparison, we're scientiffically far more advanced now, i dontthink it would be that big of a setback. We'd only change the way society operates. And if you complement the renewable technologies and fossils as bridge technologies correctly, the setback would be little /manageable.