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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Have a look at a google search on “cargo ship pollution” and draw your own conclusions.

Simply moving cargo, the lifeblood of our economy, across the oceans burns hundreds of tons of fuel oil - releasing more (and more varied) pollutants into the atmosphere and oceans. One ship, by some reports, emits as many emissions as some 50 million (or more) cars. And there are well over 9,000 on the ocean.

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This is a common misconception.

Cargo ships pollute more SO2 and NO2 than personal automobiles. Those two gases cause acid rain. Acid rain is a problem, yes.

They pollute a lot less CO2, though, which is the gas that is actually going to kill us if we don't stop emitting it at the rates we emit it today.

A cargo ship is the most efficient form of transport, in terms of CO2/kg/km.

A personal automobile is the least efficient.

And that is why researchers are proposing we bring back Zeppelins! Zeppelins that are 10x as long as the Empire State Tower is tall, to be exact. Way better for the environment, can be operated autonomously, and cheap to produce.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/zeppelins-stopped-flyin...

You figures are incorrect, this is taken directly from the linked article:

> As proposed in a recent scientific paper, the new airships would be 10 times bigger than the 800-foot Hindenburg — more than five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall

If I take hanniabu's numbers, that ends up with 8000 ft. zeppelins--the length of airport runways. That's probably not going to be operationally viable: going by the space the largest seaports take up today, you have space to berth only a few of them--maybe 5 at best--at the very largest of them. There's therefore going to be very poor operational flexibility for choosing routes, and with the sheer size and capacity, multi-destination itineraries are going to struggle with long dwell times to partially load/unload them.

Those numbers are for some very specific substances (which are also bad, nobody's contesting that), but not for CO2-equivalent emissions. It's the same kind of dumb number as that cloth bag reuse count vs plastic. Technically true for some aspect, but utterly misleading.

The Wikipedia article does not say this: « It also includes greenhouse gas emissions. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from shipping were equal to 2.2% of the global human-made emissions in 2012 »

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