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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

I think if that was the biggest problem, they'd be used much more. There are a lot of places with light and regular winds, and we're also pretty good at predicting winds in the 1 day forward timescale. And of course there's the regular and predictable high winds that were traditionally used by sail ships.

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Even a light wind with a giant sail area is dangerous. An empty 20ft shipping container weighs about two tons. If it's hanging from an airship and the wind causes it to shift even a foot it'll kill you dead if it hits you. If it hit a light frame building it would bust right through a wall. It would also easily knock down a non-reinforced cinder block wall.

A cargo airship would lowering cargo would essentially be an incredibly dangerous crane. The sail area of the airship makes it far more dangerous than lowering external cargo with a helicopter.

The article is talking about atlantic freight trips - middle of the ocean is not one of those places with light winds.

"Hindenburg made 17 round trips across the Atlantic in 1936 — its first and only full year of service — with ten trips to the United States and seven to Brazil."

A modern ship can make the same number of trips and not be dependent on weather at all.

... with unsustainable CO2 emissions. We need to be ramping down fossils use rapidly.

Ships are pretty good emissions wise because if the sheer amount of cargo they carry, even with burning the absolutely worst crap they can

Shipping sector is a huge co2 emitter and this claims to cut "fuel burn and carbon emissions by 75 percent without any sustainable fuel breakthroughs".

As we ramp down fossils we this kind of thing would enable eg international agreements to limit and progressively lower shipping sector co2 credits over time.

We need to do this for all co2 emitter sectors since all the slices of the pie are fairly small so focusing on eg top-3 doesn't solve the problem.

Do you think Hydrogen is free or something? Worse, is that Hydrogen comes from water (at least that is the current cheapest way), meaning you get Oxygen and Hydrogen from it, but if you let the Hydrogen go, it will escape the atmosphere and be whisked away by solar wind (same with Helium). Then, you have just Oxygen, which is a green-house gas.

At least the ships release other chemicals in their emissions that decrease solar warming.

Oxygen is not a greenhouse gas lmao

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