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Pioneering wind-powered cargo ship sets sail
(www.bbc.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Neat - these things usually show up in the news as a render and then you never hear about it again. Being actually built full-scale is pretty cool.
Sails obviously work, the two questions with an automated metal sail for cargo ships are cost and reliability. Making moving parts that don't break down in high wind and salt water isn't easy.
It just comes down to whether or not the fuel saved is worth more than the sail maintenance. Hopefully it is.
Plus there's that whole destroying the planet thing. Not sure if that's included as a cost.
Bunker fuel on cargo ships is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. The damage they do is immense.
We should just tax bunker fuel up to a point where it's a bit cheaper to run sails..... Only if we had a planet wide universal accord on it
Yeah such an easy solution. So who gets to keep the tax money? Who pays the tax - the ones shipping the goods, or the ones buying the goods?
Did you just wake up from eternal slumber? Everytime you buy something that arrived by lorry, be it even a tomato, everyone pays for the taxes directly and indirectly.
whoever gets paid to transport stuff around will need to buy fuel for their bussines so they can successfully deliver the goods they've been hired to deliver. So the company that owns the ships will get a full tank from the port, this time it will only be way more expenses due to taxes, and that maybe will push the the owners into investing into greener technology to transport goods that isn't as polluting.
Who keeps the taxes? The country whose port the shop was residing while fueling up.
We all know what taxes are. We all know you're an armchair thinker who believes that every problem has one simple solution, which apparently only you could think of for some reason. Anyway continue to enjoy the bliss ignorance is.
Don't be rude.
The shareholders don't care about the planet tomorrow when not caring today is profitable. That's how the system works - by design.