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Tuesday, September 20, 2022
Minneapolis Is Latest U.S. City to Demand Emissions-Free Shipping
gizmodo.com: Minneapolis, Minnesota, became the third U.S. city to endorse a carbon neutrality goal for shipping earlier this month, joining the California cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach in unanimously passing a so-called “Ship It Zero” resolution.
This is definitely a shoot for the stars situation. It is amusing to me that 300 years ago we did have zero-emission shipping and now we don’t. The best engineers are on the case and assuming you could get green energy, I imagine that the amount of propulsion necessary to take a massive container ship across the ocean is more than can be easily stored in batteries. The obvious electric generation potential in the ocean is solar panels. I have not seen a product like this for sale yet, but some sort of solar panel sheet that could unfurl over the entire deck after the ship has been loaded would be a reasonable power generation source. Wind power is not efficient on the ship and sails are complicated and not reliable. It is nice that they’re pushing polluters in this direction, but the question is what will their threat be.
This reminds me of the old "Good, fast, cheap. Choose two." thing. Like Owen says, we used to do all of the shipping of the world for free via currents. But obviously the reality is that we could never meet the demands of the entire population. There ARE ships sailing the high seas with no need for fossil fuels but those are aircraft carriers powered by nuclear reactors. The sci-fi lover in me would honestly love to have all of our ships powered by nuclear reactors but I'm sure the main setback there is cost. But how else could we have ships reach their destinations in a timely manner without their cargo spoiling, while having a drastically lower carbon footprint?
Solar panels would be great, but battery tech definitely isn't there yet and if it was, do we even have enough lithium to retrofit the probably insane number of shipping vessels?
We definitely need to start addressing these issues and stop seeking infinite growth from a finite planet.
2 comments:
This is definitely a shoot for the stars situation. It is amusing to me that 300 years ago we did have zero-emission shipping and now we don’t. The best engineers are on the case and assuming you could get green energy, I imagine that the amount of propulsion necessary to take a massive container ship across the ocean is more than can be easily stored in batteries. The obvious electric generation potential in the ocean is solar panels. I have not seen a product like this for sale yet, but some sort of solar panel sheet that could unfurl over the entire deck after the ship has been loaded would be a reasonable power generation source. Wind power is not efficient on the ship and sails are complicated and not reliable. It is nice that they’re pushing polluters in this direction, but the question is what will their threat be.
This reminds me of the old "Good, fast, cheap. Choose two." thing. Like Owen says, we used to do all of the shipping of the world for free via currents. But obviously the reality is that we could never meet the demands of the entire population. There ARE ships sailing the high seas with no need for fossil fuels but those are aircraft carriers powered by nuclear reactors. The sci-fi lover in me would honestly love to have all of our ships powered by nuclear reactors but I'm sure the main setback there is cost. But how else could we have ships reach their destinations in a timely manner without their cargo spoiling, while having a drastically lower carbon footprint?
Solar panels would be great, but battery tech definitely isn't there yet and if it was, do we even have enough lithium to retrofit the probably insane number of shipping vessels?
We definitely need to start addressing these issues and stop seeking infinite growth from a finite planet.
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