I love wood sailing ships, and I think it’s pretty amazing that you can get people to sponsor you building and sailing them in current year. Of course, from perspective of actually fighting climate change, the idea is beyond silly, but what really happens here is that you’re selling to people the idea that you’re doing it for the climate, you’re selling the feeling of doing good, and people can spend lots of money to feel and signal that. I applaud the people behind the project, and my only worry is that stunts like these are going to distract from and remove the steam from efforts that actually push the needle.
Thanks for your comment. We all know that a shipping industry based on wood boats would be awful for the environment. We all know what would happen to the Amazon. So yes, you are right, it is silly to sell this as a solution to climate change.
Isn't wood one of the few renewable building resources we have? Besides building ships out of aluminum I don't see any other better choices. I don't totally agree with the conclusion; in the article itself they admit that this is more of a flagship project to show it's possible to achieve fossil-fuel-free shipping, not a solid commercial venture.
Or maybe that was sarcasm? Better avoided in this forum.
In the past, wood was an essential resource for building navies and it took a lot of wood to build the navies of old. The Romans deforested a huge chunk of their lands to retain their naval power in the Mediterranean.
Steel is fine too; the crust of the earth is about 5% iron, so it's not like we're going to run out of it. Current steel production is terribly high in emissions though, but e.g. hydrogen reduction as is being done by the HYBRIT project in Sweden show the way how to fix that.
Each of concrete, steel, traffic will double our energy consumption. So if you want to do those from renewables, we will need to quadruple production, yet we struggle with providing even the current level of electricity from renewables.
Green steel, concrete or traffic from hydrogen is a far-out pipedream for quite some time.
Yes, it is renewable, but it renews very slowly. Thus, to start a massive wood based shipping industry (it should be massive to have an impact) it would cause serious deforestation.
Large wood based military navies caused large deforestation in the past.
We can’t build ships of large size from wood. It’s just not technically possible, wood is not a suitable material for a structure that’s subject to stresses required. You’d need to add extensive steel skeleton structure to support it, and even then you’d be fighting constant leaks, and risking sinking at high seas.
Wood works great for constructing large buildings, but ships are not like buildings: unlike them, they are subject to large dynamic stresses. That’s why before widespread structural steel in 19th century, wooden ships were tiny. Mayflower was less than 30 meters long. They didn’t build it larger because they lacked lumber, they did it because previous attempts at larger ships tended to break apart at sea.
The only effort that matters is the move to nuclear power.
We are so far away from doing anything meaningful about climate change that any projects, including solar, we are pushing for today are meaningless.
Enjoy the 30 good years left where industrial civilization can be stably sustained and then be prepared for the bumpy ride to a world of 500 million over the next century or two.
The only effort that matters is the move to nuclear power.
I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK.
We won't solve climate change without dramatically changing our patterns of consumption. Trying to apply technical fixes is repeating the same patterns of thought that got us here in the first place.
> I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK.
I'm having a very hard time believing that. In Czechia there are companies building entire towns (for rent), and these are still small compared to some of the new industrial areas, surely that can't be less concrete than a nuclear power plant
Renewables would work?? For global power?? My friend, you need to look further into this.
The only solution we have, and I do mean the only solution is nuclear fusion. I understand why no one wants to throw money at this problem... cheap, unlimited power is nothing that old people running the world want, because they can't inflate their bank accounts by making that a reality, but we don't have a choice.
If we don't crack fusion, we're done as a species.
We can't crack fusion because we can't get all the first-world nations to throw 1% GDP at it. I guarantee you, if we threw $250 billion a year at fusion, we'd have it in 10 years.
Even if we had fusion working already, a fusion powerplant would be expensive to build - comparable to a similar sized fission plant. At a conservative estimate of $2 Billion per GW, that $250B/yr would take more than a century just to build enough reactors to replace current fossil fuel consumption. Realistically, fusion is unlikely to be cost competitive with other power sources outside of niche applications. Even if fusion winds up powering our civilization in the future, something else will have to act as a stop-gap.
> If we don't crack fusion, we're done as a species.
Well that's ridiculous. Using the technology we have right now we could increase provision of renewables and reduce consumption and be completely fine as a species.
Using the "renewable" technology we have today we'll push the problem a little into the future, out of our direct sight, and into a different science sector while making many new unknown/unresearched/unforeseen problems in the process, but definitely not improve anything.
For example because these require vast swaths of land close to the place of consumption. That means destroying the nature near human settlements, which is often also the most unique (both humans and the nature thrive in similar environments).
2% of the land area of Germany would suffice to satisfy all energy demand of the country. Sunnier places fare even better. There is very little "nature" near human settlements. Almost all of the land is used for agriculture. For example, replacing the 2.4 million hectares Germany uses for "energy crops" with solar panels would cover a large part of Germany's energy demand.
And while trash is indeed a problem, I don't think stopping global warming in exchange for more trash would count as no improvement at all.
I don't believe that amount takes in consideration that there are many and many days in Germany when the sun doesn't shine almost at all. I live nearby (in Czechia) and the solar arrays here are very widespread - so much that both the biologists and the public already hate them and don't want any more - and yet it all generates only a few percents of our energy. The cost of these projects was enormous too. Czechia will be building new nuclear power sources soon and decommission some of the arrays, thankfully people here are not like Germans.
I also don't think we should aim to generate the same amount of energy. We want more and better manufacturing, and if that should be done cleanly, it needs a lot of electricity, way more than the "renewables" could ever bring.
You can do the math yourself. Solar panels have around 150W/m^2. In Germany they produce a little more than 10% of peak output if you average over one year. The average German uses about 48000kWh per year (primary energy), so around 350m^2 per person. That's around 8% of Germany's land area, or two percentage points more than what we currently use for energy crops.
Since primary energy includes heat and transportation, both of which can be done much more efficient with electricity (e.g. a car is maybe 30% efficient, and a heat pump gets you 2-5J of heat per Joule of electricity) you can very conservatively cut that in half. I'm reasonably sure that it also includes power plant inefficiencies (another 40%?) but let's not account for those.
That gets you down to about 4%. Wind power is more efficient per m^2 than solar in Germany, and a lot can be produced offshore. That gets you down to the 2-3% range. And of course a lot of solar can be installed on rooftops and such where it doesn't consume any additional land at all.
You're thinking 100 years down the road. I'm thinking 100,000.
We need fusion to bootstrap getting off this planet. We need fusion to provide the power to start terraforming either Mars or Venus. Either planet will require obscene power loads to terraform and will likely be 500-1000 year endeavors.
We not only have to get off this planet to survive as a species, we have to get out of this solar system.
We don't do that without extremely potent power sources that use abundant, cheap fuel.
We don't face an existential threat on a decades-long timescale.
We were told the same thing in the 60s. It didn't turn out to be true then, it won't turn out to be true now.
No one. No. One. Has made accurate predictions about long-term climate change effects so far. And I imagine 40 years from now, when I'm 80, I'll be hearing about some new climate disaster that will befall us.
This is Malthusianism all over again.
Technology allowed us to progress past Malthus, it'll allow us to progress past climate change... but only if its cheap, plentiful, usable 24/7, and shared with the world.
I have looked into it before reaching this conclusion. Could you provide evidence to the contrary?
Nuclear fusion is most definitely not an option, because it can't be built in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. Fission perhaps, but I'm skeptical there too. I don't believe we have the capacity to manufacture enough reactors quickly enough to rely solely on fission.
Nuclear is essentially done (outside of niches), simply because renewables have become cheaper (in $/MWh produced) than nuclear, while having non of nuclears disadvantages.
I think there is a place for sailing cargo ships, not convinced about wood though but would love to be wrong. Related, here is a project of a 67.5m/221ft long (LOA) sailing ship, with what looks like a steel hull https://www.towt.eu/voilier-cargo-towt/?lang=en
...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades.
I do wonder if long-intended-lifespan wood materials, like the cross-laminated timber used to build this wooden skyscraper (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revoluti...) could consume enough volume to make a meaningful dent in the carbon balance for the near/mid term of the next decades/century.
That depends on where it biodegrades, how fast, the active lifespan and the number.
For instance the lumber in a building might stay in use for 100 years. Even if we aim for sustainability instead of our exponential growth pyramid schemes, every wooden structure ties up that carbon for its life span, after which another will be built. If the number of buildings we needs declines, we can plant more forests in the space we are no longer using.
True. It can also have surprisingly good strength to weight ratio if used correctly.
I'm no carpenter but I'd suspect the downsides are that it's biodegradable (and hence it will rot and things will eat it), it's a biological material and so its properties are going to be somewhat inconsistent, and it's very labour intensive to build with.
I'd also be curious just how cheap it is per strength (not weight or volume) compared with steel. I'd suspect the comparison comes out heavily in steel's favour or we'd be using way more wood.
It won't. Capacity is minuscule this is 9 containers small ones are 1000-3000 and giants are 20000. Speed is 2/3rds. The crew is likely larger or same size.
Plus wooden ships are pain to maintain. Though lifespan might be larger. Not sure about costs to build though.
I just can't see reasonable way for this to work outside customers who really want to pay the premium for slower service.
On the other hand the crew might get a larger share of the profits compared to the crew on container ships.
Also, this is a prototype and effectively a research platform. And if you are going to build with wood, there are not many contemporary designs floating around. Starting with a proven design may be a good idea.
> Ceiba is small for a cargo ship – tiny in fact. She will carry around nine standard shipping containers. The largest conventional container ships today carry more than 20,000 containers.
She will carry the cargo equivalent of 9 shipping containers, or they are going to actually load 9 shipping containers onto the ship?
The ships and crews are expensive. Any time they aren't moving they aren't making money. Isn't the whole point of shipping containers that you can buffer them up and then rapidly load them onto a ship once it arrives?
I'd love to see truly modern wind powered ships - maybe more rotor ships (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship) or something using a modern CFD designed computer controlled aerofoil. Something that could actually slot into the modern shipping industry and reduce emissions - even if only by 20% or in favourable winds.
Building 120 year old ship designs without the aid of modern construction techniques is cool, but it's not going to change the shipping industry.
It seems that they are indeed pioneering new technology, a mix of solar + sails + electric propulsion, including power regen from underwater propellers. It will have "one of the largest marine electric engines in the world".
The wood framing is likely just the most accessible way to build a technology demonstration model.
Wallenius Marine is designing one. Together with their partner Wilhemsen they are one of the words largest Ro-Ro operators. Completely different scale, although always hard when one of the incumbents try to innovate.
large cargo ships max at 25 knots. downward trend to save fuel, 20 knots is becoming norm. future norm might be as low as 12 knots.
duration of trips between China and USA have been 2 - 4 weeks. so will lengthen to 4 - 8 weeks.
so... given 7947 nautical miles (China to USA), a glider would take 11 months. Hmmm.
--
For future, imagine 12 knots satisfies majority of tasks. There may be payloads where 2 months transit may be acceptable. Is there some combo of sail, foil, rotor, glider, coasting that could sustain 6 knots? Would much smaller, more frequent cargo ships be acceptable.
One final notion: My original imagined use case for wave gliders is ocean cleanup. Various kinds of plastic sifting barges, forever at sea. Maybe bundle the plastic and drop it into a trench. Maybe have some kind of solar powered bio reactor that uses plastic as fuel. Maybe other bigger ships gathering the bails of plastic, like land based garbage trucks ply our neighborhoods.
> After a day spent at the shipyard watching Ceiba being built, I ask Lynx Guimond, another co-founder of Sailcargo, what he thinks is really needed to cut the shipping industry’s sizeable emissions. Perhaps surprisingly for someone in the middle of building a ship, he tells me that one of the solutions is simply less shipping. “At the end of the day we just need to transport less stuff.”
I love it when people are so brutally honest about their own work.
It's a good sign of someone who isn't bound by dogma.
Far too many people are locked into the consumerism cycle, that we must improve the things we consume and consume more of them, because "more good" must be the same as "better overall", right?
I doubt a guy running ship-building is 'bound by dogma'. The consumers are the ones who need to be brainwashed into buying new stuff every 20 minutes; the producers don't need to be convinced into some grand story in order to comply- acting along is in their best interests, it's exactly what they want to do! They can do it, knowing exactly what's going on, with their eyes open.
Whoever can do so at the systemic level instead of expecting individual corporations to not be evil.
I'm not really in the mood to discuss whether or not government regulation has any hope of doing so here, since there's a much-too-common inability to look beyond the dysfunctional US political system that is just too tiresome to discuss around on a Monday morning.
But I will say on a meta-level that one way or another this must involve some form of politics, because fundamentally it's about humans trying to bring out desired human behavior.
Global climate accords, putting a price on carbon and thus making steel and burning fuel more expensive. The market can optimize well as long as the cost function is good.
Sure, but it's the determining of the cost function where the irrational debating starts.
Similarly, suggesting that there are situations where the cost function is both necessary and has such a high constant overhead that you're better off with a non-market system is a non-starter half of the time.
I don't think discussing about the shape of the cost function is necessarily irrational.
Let's say you've inherited a small fortune that includes a mansion. The mansion's upkeep is slowly eating away the fortune. What do you do? You can rationally make some scenarios how to deal with it. Maybe you sell it. Maybe you rent it out. Maybe you invest in it and start a hotel.
We're not talking about markets and cost functions as a general abstraction here, we're talking about the specific context of adjusting company behavior.
It doesn't really matter which industry sector does the improvements as long as the total improves. Doing it with free market ensures that they happen where they are cheapest.
I wonder if all it would take is a change to how consumption taxes work. Sales tax and value added tax don't really discriminate between resource consumption and value added from workmanship. But one could at least imagine a taxation scheme that instead focuses on material inputs (including fuel). And that would hypothetically economically favor higher-quality, more durable goods over things like planned obsolescence and fast fashion.
Might be technically tricky to accomplish in a world where most manufacturing happens overseas, though.
My favorite proposal is to require that all companies take back their products at EOL and recycle them to an extremely high standard. This pushes the externalities of low lifespan products directly back onto the manufacturer, encouraging them to design for both lifespan and easy repair/recycling.
Unfortunately we’ll also have to deal with IKEA style tactics of converting a single company into a complex web of disposable sub companies in order to dodge their tax or regulatory obligations.
Products do last, yes we can all cite examples of products that have failed earlier than we want but for the most part products today do very well considering that many never see any service before before being replaced for newer product and if they do get a service call its because they did finally break. Yes, some require none or there are no user serviceable parts
Now, I say this, owning and still using a Toastmaster Toaster which is older than myself; all my dinnerware and glassware is older than most people along with desk lamps now using LEDs but were produced in the 30s; but the point is people don't put any effort into taking care of items because for many they have reached the point of disposable.
Then when it comes to tech its not reliability but marketing has become so good people are quite willing to toss perfectly working items for the latest and greatest. Hell people do this with cars and anecdotally from a coworkers spouse who works in a home renovation company they toss perfectly good large appliances too.
Oh they do, they really do. I worked at a recycling factory in the UK, the amount of household appliances, TVs, computers and computer parts, laptops, phones that people toss away is staggering.
Many are in absolutely perfect working condition! Like, a 48" Samsung TV and a 52 inch 4K Sony TV would come in, we'd test them, nothing wrong with them. I can only assume someone moved house and just left everything, or they upgraded to bigger TVs.
Not even going to mention the washers, dryers, dishwashers, fridges, about a quarter of them would be in good working condition. Who throws away a perfectly fine washer? Why? A new model has nothing new inside technology-wise, I can promise you that.
It was against company policy, but employees would take them home, either for a low price (got myself a nice Neff microwave oven and a Bosch vacuum for £10 each... retail price in the hundreds) or just by being friends with a supervisor...
I'm actually glad about that, because otherwise they'd be loaded into containers and sent to Asia or Africa somewhere. Absolutely ridiculous.
> Who throws away a perfectly fine washer? Why? A new model has nothing new inside technology-wise, I can promise you that.
When I first moved in my house I didn't have a job, so I bought a lot of cheap appliances. Most of them still work, and I expect them to keep on working with almost no maintenance for years to come. However, they have some serious downsides: they are energy inefficient, they make a lot of noise, and they do not necessarily fit my future needs.
For example, now that I have a partner, my fridge is a bit small. And instead of running the washer once every two weeks, we're running it two or more times a week. Every time I run the washer, the floor the washer is on becomes basically unlivable for about half an hour or so due to loud noise of the centrifuge.
I do not want to buy new stuff, particularly because the old stuff "still works". And getting rid of my old stuff in a nice way is not easy either: Because they have wear and tear, goodwill and second-hand shops are not overly enthusiastic about taking them from me. Unless I can find someone to take something over (for free!), I am left with moving it to the recycling place because I do not have any storage space in my house.
I should've mentioned these were (and are) mostly midrange to high end stuff.
The cheaper models are the ones that go straight to scrap, because they're unfixable - poor electronics with no water protection, low quality bearings and drum spiders that fail catastrophically (and the drums are welded instead of using bolts = unfixable) and counterweights that simply crumble.
I get it when they break and there's no other choice but to chuck them. But throwing away good appliances is just unthinkable for me. I use them all until they fail, fix them and use them some more, until they're unfixable :D
Worst case, I'd try to sell them for cheap or give them to someone who needs them, there's plenty of people in every country.
The efficiency of washers and dishwashers has been the same for about two decades now. There's simply nothing that can be improved inside.
Dryers have had a decent improvement with heat pumps, other than that, it's the same design that's been around for decades.
It’s less important with desk lamps, but I occasionally wonder how green old appliances really are. Sure, they last a long time, which reduces the emissions from production and transit. But on average they also consume a boat load of energy compared to their energy star equivalents, and they do it for decades.
The reason it matters lies with a desk lamp is because you probably aren’t still running incandescent bulbs in it.
I used to work for a corporation that made photographic equipment. Expensive photographic equipment.
They would regularly "crush" out-of-date equipment (like stuff that had passed its market prime, so the sales and marketing folks no longer needed it). By "crush," it meant taking the equipment to an old quarry, and smashing it with a sledgehammer.
Apparently, this was necessary for a tax write-off.
It was painful as hell, as most of the equipment was perfectly fine. It included things like bodies and lenses, still worth thousands.
It would be good to have some openness about how long products last from returns and warranty information. This could help consumers make a more informed choice.
The problem with this is that newer products are often significantly more efficient.
The environment would likely be in worse shape if we were all still using CRT monitors, plasma TVs, old A/C units, incandescent lightbulbs, cars from the 70s.
I haven't read the book, only reviews, but based on those, it seemed to me that that McAfee's thesis relies on carefully selected numbers. For example, using "number of cattle" as a proxy for resource input into the dairy industry, even though everyone else just measures actual resource input.
It leaves me wondering if the book (which I admittedly won't be reading; my existing reading list is already long enough) ends up functioning a bit like that satirical paper on smoking and long distance running from 10 years back. In it, the authors "convincingly" argued that marathon runners should all be smokers. The overall structure was a sort of numeric Gish Gallop: the paper focused on a constellation of individual measurements that are plausibly associated with both smoking and long distance running performance, while carefully steering clear of any measurement of smokers' actual athletic performance.
I guess you have to compare the impact of cutting down some trees (and replacing them, I assume? Maybe even replacing them with more trees in a wider area), drying them and cutting them with the impact of mining, smelting and producing Steel for more traditional ships. I assume mining also involves removing trees and wildlife to clear the area.
These things aren't always as obvious as "cutting down trees is bad", if it's better than the alternatives and we can offset the impact then its an improvement right?
It is worth a study since the trees needed for ships (hard woods) is very different than trees needed for construction/paper (soft woods). Pine trees grow fast and can be harvested while relatively young and weak. Trees for ships tend to be older and stronger hard woods that take much longer to grow.
As I understand it, paper doesn't care how tight grained the wood pulp was. Wooden beams meant for longevity or load bearing very much do, and a lot of the best ones are hardwood (deciduous), or the cypress family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupressaceae) many of which are slow growing but very long-lived.
While I love the idea of bulk transport based on sail power, making this out of wood instead of steel is really one of those feel-good things instead of a practical way to protect the earth. The trees Ceiba is made of take the better part of a century to grow to maturity, and steel is actually pretty good for the environment all things considered: most steel container ships are recycled due to the high value of the steel. A completely different story to fiberglass, which is basically plastic and is tossed in landfills.
If only fiberglass were plastic. It’s a composite of glass and plastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiberglass). Separating the two for recycling is difficult.
Ceiba is a traditional three-mast schooner [1] that carries an equivalent of 9 shipping containers but not actual containers:
> The design of the Ceiba Line vessels boasts two cargo hatches to access the holds, which can be used simultaneously. This increases flexibility and storage options when loading and unloading cargo.
Construction [2] of the first ship started January 2019 in Costa Rica and is ongoing. The company strategy is ethical shipping that removes modern container ships from the supply chain. I suspect that this ship/company will be part of the marketing message for Fair Trade coffee and other organic/sustainable products from the tropics.
The story [3] is not about automation, engineering, or productivity; it is about pre-industrial purity.
I wonder how many people in this conversation have actually seen a shipping port first hand.
I've spent a good deal of time gazing out at the docks at the Port of Seattle. There are train cars and last-mile tractor-trailers that are designed to have a cargo container bolted directly to them. Without the containers, you have to repack the cargo half a dozen times:
- factory to truck/train
- truck to docks
- docks to ship
- ship to docks
- docks to truck/train
- truck to warehouse/distribution center
With the shipping containers you have:
- warehouse to container
- container to warehouse/distribution center
The effort needed to move the container instead of the contents is a couple orders of magnitude less, which is the whole point of the containers.
Marc Levinson's book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [1] is a good source. Many people, including a very vocal minority of HN commenters, subscribe to a romanticized view of nature. Steven Pinker refers to this as the Noble Savage [2] in his book The Blank Slate [3]. Personally, I think Adam Smith's Invisible Hand and Charles Darwin's Tangled Bank are both manifestations of the same marvellous mechanism: emergent order.
I believe high carbon taxes are what's needed to capture the negative externalities of our current systems. All these do-good attempts are wonderful to show what's possible, but so much more would happen automatically if we just accounted for the true costs of things.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadOr maybe that was sarcasm? Better avoided in this forum.
Green steel, concrete or traffic from hydrogen is a far-out pipedream for quite some time.
Large wood based military navies caused large deforestation in the past.
Wood works great for constructing large buildings, but ships are not like buildings: unlike them, they are subject to large dynamic stresses. That’s why before widespread structural steel in 19th century, wooden ships were tiny. Mayflower was less than 30 meters long. They didn’t build it larger because they lacked lumber, they did it because previous attempts at larger ships tended to break apart at sea.
We are so far away from doing anything meaningful about climate change that any projects, including solar, we are pushing for today are meaningless.
Enjoy the 30 good years left where industrial civilization can be stably sustained and then be prepared for the bumpy ride to a world of 500 million over the next century or two.
I'm not even sure about that. The biggest concrete pour in Europe right now is for a nuclear power station in the UK.
We won't solve climate change without dramatically changing our patterns of consumption. Trying to apply technical fixes is repeating the same patterns of thought that got us here in the first place.
I'm having a very hard time believing that. In Czechia there are companies building entire towns (for rent), and these are still small compared to some of the new industrial areas, surely that can't be less concrete than a nuclear power plant
The only solution we have, and I do mean the only solution is nuclear fusion. I understand why no one wants to throw money at this problem... cheap, unlimited power is nothing that old people running the world want, because they can't inflate their bank accounts by making that a reality, but we don't have a choice.
If we don't crack fusion, we're done as a species.
The actual problem is nobody knows how to make a fusion reactor work.
We can't crack fusion because we can't get all the first-world nations to throw 1% GDP at it. I guarantee you, if we threw $250 billion a year at fusion, we'd have it in 10 years.
Well that's ridiculous. Using the technology we have right now we could increase provision of renewables and reduce consumption and be completely fine as a species.
Manufacturing and later decommissioning the storage and solars is not nice to the nature too. I wonder if the oceans of the 22nd century will be full of plastics, or... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/solar-panel...
And while trash is indeed a problem, I don't think stopping global warming in exchange for more trash would count as no improvement at all.
I also don't think we should aim to generate the same amount of energy. We want more and better manufacturing, and if that should be done cleanly, it needs a lot of electricity, way more than the "renewables" could ever bring.
Since primary energy includes heat and transportation, both of which can be done much more efficient with electricity (e.g. a car is maybe 30% efficient, and a heat pump gets you 2-5J of heat per Joule of electricity) you can very conservatively cut that in half. I'm reasonably sure that it also includes power plant inefficiencies (another 40%?) but let's not account for those.
That gets you down to about 4%. Wind power is more efficient per m^2 than solar in Germany, and a lot can be produced offshore. That gets you down to the 2-3% range. And of course a lot of solar can be installed on rooftops and such where it doesn't consume any additional land at all.
We need fusion to bootstrap getting off this planet. We need fusion to provide the power to start terraforming either Mars or Venus. Either planet will require obscene power loads to terraform and will likely be 500-1000 year endeavors.
We not only have to get off this planet to survive as a species, we have to get out of this solar system.
We don't do that without extremely potent power sources that use abundant, cheap fuel.
We were told the same thing in the 60s. It didn't turn out to be true then, it won't turn out to be true now.
No one. No. One. Has made accurate predictions about long-term climate change effects so far. And I imagine 40 years from now, when I'm 80, I'll be hearing about some new climate disaster that will befall us.
This is Malthusianism all over again.
Technology allowed us to progress past Malthus, it'll allow us to progress past climate change... but only if its cheap, plentiful, usable 24/7, and shared with the world.
All things fusion could achieve.
Nuclear fusion is most definitely not an option, because it can't be built in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. Fission perhaps, but I'm skeptical there too. I don't believe we have the capacity to manufacture enough reactors quickly enough to rely solely on fission.
Best of luck to the Ceiba/sailcargo team though! The project -> https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel
...but that particular benefit is lost if it biodegrades.
I do wonder if long-intended-lifespan wood materials, like the cross-laminated timber used to build this wooden skyscraper (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wooden-skyscraper-revoluti...) could consume enough volume to make a meaningful dent in the carbon balance for the near/mid term of the next decades/century.
Easy, shoot it into space! /s
For instance the lumber in a building might stay in use for 100 years. Even if we aim for sustainability instead of our exponential growth pyramid schemes, every wooden structure ties up that carbon for its life span, after which another will be built. If the number of buildings we needs declines, we can plant more forests in the space we are no longer using.
I'm no carpenter but I'd suspect the downsides are that it's biodegradable (and hence it will rot and things will eat it), it's a biological material and so its properties are going to be somewhat inconsistent, and it's very labour intensive to build with.
I'd also be curious just how cheap it is per strength (not weight or volume) compared with steel. I'd suspect the comparison comes out heavily in steel's favour or we'd be using way more wood.
Also, this is a prototype and effectively a research platform. And if you are going to build with wood, there are not many contemporary designs floating around. Starting with a proven design may be a good idea.
The ships and crews are expensive. Any time they aren't moving they aren't making money. Isn't the whole point of shipping containers that you can buffer them up and then rapidly load them onto a ship once it arrives?
Building 120 year old ship designs without the aid of modern construction techniques is cool, but it's not going to change the shipping industry.
The wood framing is likely just the most accessible way to build a technology demonstration model.
Like this?
https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/
https://www.oceanbirdwallenius.com/
https://www.liquid-robotics.com/wave-glider/overview/
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After some quick googling:
gliders travel 0.5-1.5 knots
large cargo ships max at 25 knots. downward trend to save fuel, 20 knots is becoming norm. future norm might be as low as 12 knots.
duration of trips between China and USA have been 2 - 4 weeks. so will lengthen to 4 - 8 weeks.
so... given 7947 nautical miles (China to USA), a glider would take 11 months. Hmmm.
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For future, imagine 12 knots satisfies majority of tasks. There may be payloads where 2 months transit may be acceptable. Is there some combo of sail, foil, rotor, glider, coasting that could sustain 6 knots? Would much smaller, more frequent cargo ships be acceptable.
One final notion: My original imagined use case for wave gliders is ocean cleanup. Various kinds of plastic sifting barges, forever at sea. Maybe bundle the plastic and drop it into a trench. Maybe have some kind of solar powered bio reactor that uses plastic as fuel. Maybe other bigger ships gathering the bails of plastic, like land based garbage trucks ply our neighborhoods.
I love it when people are so brutally honest about their own work.
Far too many people are locked into the consumerism cycle, that we must improve the things we consume and consume more of them, because "more good" must be the same as "better overall", right?
Sadly, the best solution is for corporations to make more robust, high-quality, long-lasting, expensive, products.
i.e. Make less money, and do better work.
So...who's first at bat?
I'm not really in the mood to discuss whether or not government regulation has any hope of doing so here, since there's a much-too-common inability to look beyond the dysfunctional US political system that is just too tiresome to discuss around on a Monday morning.
But I will say on a meta-level that one way or another this must involve some form of politics, because fundamentally it's about humans trying to bring out desired human behavior.
Similarly, suggesting that there are situations where the cost function is both necessary and has such a high constant overhead that you're better off with a non-market system is a non-starter half of the time.
Let's say you've inherited a small fortune that includes a mansion. The mansion's upkeep is slowly eating away the fortune. What do you do? You can rationally make some scenarios how to deal with it. Maybe you sell it. Maybe you rent it out. Maybe you invest in it and start a hotel.
It doesn't really matter which industry sector does the improvements as long as the total improves. Doing it with free market ensures that they happen where they are cheapest.
Might be technically tricky to accomplish in a world where most manufacturing happens overseas, though.
Unfortunately we’ll also have to deal with IKEA style tactics of converting a single company into a complex web of disposable sub companies in order to dodge their tax or regulatory obligations.
Regarding your second point, don't we already have to do the latter anyway?
Now, I say this, owning and still using a Toastmaster Toaster which is older than myself; all my dinnerware and glassware is older than most people along with desk lamps now using LEDs but were produced in the 30s; but the point is people don't put any effort into taking care of items because for many they have reached the point of disposable.
Then when it comes to tech its not reliability but marketing has become so good people are quite willing to toss perfectly working items for the latest and greatest. Hell people do this with cars and anecdotally from a coworkers spouse who works in a home renovation company they toss perfectly good large appliances too.
I grew up in Africa, and was exposed to people without a pot to piss in, making things last waaaaaayyyy beyond their "sell by" date.
If I remember, Apple recently took a hit on their iPhone bottom line, because people are no longer getting a new phone every year.
Oh they do, they really do. I worked at a recycling factory in the UK, the amount of household appliances, TVs, computers and computer parts, laptops, phones that people toss away is staggering.
Many are in absolutely perfect working condition! Like, a 48" Samsung TV and a 52 inch 4K Sony TV would come in, we'd test them, nothing wrong with them. I can only assume someone moved house and just left everything, or they upgraded to bigger TVs.
Not even going to mention the washers, dryers, dishwashers, fridges, about a quarter of them would be in good working condition. Who throws away a perfectly fine washer? Why? A new model has nothing new inside technology-wise, I can promise you that.
It was against company policy, but employees would take them home, either for a low price (got myself a nice Neff microwave oven and a Bosch vacuum for £10 each... retail price in the hundreds) or just by being friends with a supervisor...
I'm actually glad about that, because otherwise they'd be loaded into containers and sent to Asia or Africa somewhere. Absolutely ridiculous.
When I first moved in my house I didn't have a job, so I bought a lot of cheap appliances. Most of them still work, and I expect them to keep on working with almost no maintenance for years to come. However, they have some serious downsides: they are energy inefficient, they make a lot of noise, and they do not necessarily fit my future needs.
For example, now that I have a partner, my fridge is a bit small. And instead of running the washer once every two weeks, we're running it two or more times a week. Every time I run the washer, the floor the washer is on becomes basically unlivable for about half an hour or so due to loud noise of the centrifuge.
I do not want to buy new stuff, particularly because the old stuff "still works". And getting rid of my old stuff in a nice way is not easy either: Because they have wear and tear, goodwill and second-hand shops are not overly enthusiastic about taking them from me. Unless I can find someone to take something over (for free!), I am left with moving it to the recycling place because I do not have any storage space in my house.
The cheaper models are the ones that go straight to scrap, because they're unfixable - poor electronics with no water protection, low quality bearings and drum spiders that fail catastrophically (and the drums are welded instead of using bolts = unfixable) and counterweights that simply crumble.
I get it when they break and there's no other choice but to chuck them. But throwing away good appliances is just unthinkable for me. I use them all until they fail, fix them and use them some more, until they're unfixable :D
Worst case, I'd try to sell them for cheap or give them to someone who needs them, there's plenty of people in every country.
The efficiency of washers and dishwashers has been the same for about two decades now. There's simply nothing that can be improved inside.
Dryers have had a decent improvement with heat pumps, other than that, it's the same design that's been around for decades.
The reason it matters lies with a desk lamp is because you probably aren’t still running incandescent bulbs in it.
They would regularly "crush" out-of-date equipment (like stuff that had passed its market prime, so the sales and marketing folks no longer needed it). By "crush," it meant taking the equipment to an old quarry, and smashing it with a sledgehammer.
Apparently, this was necessary for a tax write-off.
It was painful as hell, as most of the equipment was perfectly fine. It included things like bodies and lenses, still worth thousands.
The environment would likely be in worse shape if we were all still using CRT monitors, plasma TVs, old A/C units, incandescent lightbulbs, cars from the 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion
Hm, seems to contradict this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
Here I see energy consumption going straight up.
It leaves me wondering if the book (which I admittedly won't be reading; my existing reading list is already long enough) ends up functioning a bit like that satirical paper on smoking and long distance running from 10 years back. In it, the authors "convincingly" argued that marathon runners should all be smokers. The overall structure was a sort of numeric Gish Gallop: the paper focused on a constellation of individual measurements that are plausibly associated with both smoking and long distance running performance, while carefully steering clear of any measurement of smokers' actual athletic performance.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/
These things aren't always as obvious as "cutting down trees is bad", if it's better than the alternatives and we can offset the impact then its an improvement right?
> The design of the Ceiba Line vessels boasts two cargo hatches to access the holds, which can be used simultaneously. This increases flexibility and storage options when loading and unloading cargo.
Construction [2] of the first ship started January 2019 in Costa Rica and is ongoing. The company strategy is ethical shipping that removes modern container ships from the supply chain. I suspect that this ship/company will be part of the marketing message for Fair Trade coffee and other organic/sustainable products from the tropics.
The story [3] is not about automation, engineering, or productivity; it is about pre-industrial purity.
[1] https://www.sailcargo.org/en/vessel
[2] https://www.sailcargo.org/en/milestones
[3] https://youtu.be/rNf7-34tW8I
I've spent a good deal of time gazing out at the docks at the Port of Seattle. There are train cars and last-mile tractor-trailers that are designed to have a cargo container bolted directly to them. Without the containers, you have to repack the cargo half a dozen times:
- factory to truck/train
- truck to docks
- docks to ship
- ship to docks
- docks to truck/train
- truck to warehouse/distribution center
With the shipping containers you have:
- warehouse to container
- container to warehouse/distribution center
The effort needed to move the container instead of the contents is a couple orders of magnitude less, which is the whole point of the containers.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate