Giant kites could pull ships across the ocean – and slash their carbon emissions | CNN
www.cnn.com
French company Airseas has developed the Seawing, a kite to help propel cargo ships, which it says could cut their carbon emissions by an average of 20%.
  • Ilovethebomb@lemmy.world
    5·
    10 months ago

    This is a technology that has been on the horizon for decades, but has only ever been used on a handful of vessels.

    If the benefits are as great as claimed, why isn’t this the standard everywhere?

    • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      82·
      10 months ago

      Personally I would assume because it’s a pain in the ass to maintain, when fossil fuels are less so and not presently heavily penalized.

      I mean really, wind was the original seafaring option, so we already know it can be harnessed that way, but the current capitalist framework rewards doing things cheap at the expense of the planet.

      Cargo ships use real bad fuels, anything would help, it just needs to be required or cheaper than polluting alternatives.

    • sndrtj@feddit.nl
      5·
      10 months ago

      Looks like internalized costs for this rather than the externalized costs for fossil fuels. Only regulation can truly fix that.