Combating Doom and Gloom [Back Story]
IEEE Spectrum · 2021
In 2014, two distinguished Google engineers wrote for IEEE Spectrum about the sobering lessons they’d learned while trying to develop renewable-energy systems that were as cheap as coal. That article, titled “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change,” struck a chord. By the metric of online readership, it was the seventh most popular article Spectrum published in the 2010s. The piece bluntly described the enormous scale of the challenge. Seven years later, the authors, David Fork and Ross Koningstein, are back with a new message, and it’s surprisingly hopeful. "It’s stunning how rapidly things have been moving since the first article was published," says Fork. The scope of the challenge is still enormous, of course, but experts now have a better understanding of how a variety of technologies could be combined to prevent catastrophic climate change, the coauthors say.