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.

中文翻译：

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对抗厄运和忧郁[背景故事]


2014 年，两位杰出的 Google 工程师为 IEEE Spectrum 撰文，讲述了他们在尝试开发与煤炭一样便宜的可再生能源系统时学到的发人深省的教训。这篇题为“扭转气候变化真正需要什么”的文章引起了共鸣。按照在线读者数量衡量，这是 2010 年代 Spectrum 发表的第七大最受欢迎的文章。这篇文章直言不讳地描述了挑战的巨大规模。七年后，作者大卫·福克和罗斯·科宁斯坦带着新的信息回来了，而且令人惊讶地充满希望。 “自第一篇文章发表以来，事情进展得如此之快，令人震惊，”福克说。当然，挑战的范围仍然巨大，但专家们现在对如何结合各种技术来防止灾难性的气候变化有了更好的理解，合著者说。