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7 votes
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Denmark launches the Laura Maersk, the first container ship to run entirely on green methanol – will save 2.75 million tonnes of CO2 per year
21 votes -
Sweden's right-wing government says it will turn its back on plastic bag tax from November 2024
20 votes -
Ministers set to ban single-use vapes in UK over child addiction fears
30 votes -
Rafting the most polluted river in Australia
15 votes -
California Department of Transportation awards $54 million for Sustainable Transportation Planning grants
7 votes -
Palm oil giants Indonesia, Malaysia start talks with EU over deforestation rule
7 votes -
Scientists discovered why Germany’s wild boar are radioactive
26 votes -
Direct solar power: Off-grid without batteries
28 votes -
London’s plan to charge drivers of polluting cars sparks protests and stirs political passions
29 votes -
Applying taxes to beef products could be one way to reduce CO2 emissions, says the Danish Government
26 votes -
Mexican politician introduces bill to criminalize ecocide - only a few countries have such laws but more are considering it
16 votes -
Engineers just made concrete 30% stronger. The secret ingredient? Coffee.
37 votes -
Ecuadorians reject oil drilling in the Amazon, ending operations in a protected area
13 votes -
Ecuador prepares for ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ vote to stop oil drilling
18 votes -
US federal grants will replace tunnels beneath roads that let water pass but not fish
16 votes -
The EPA’s ambitious plan to cut auto emissions receives pushback from US automakers
29 votes -
US President Joe Biden to designate a new national monument surrounding the Grand Canyon
45 votes -
A charge on supermarket single-use plastic bags has led to 98% drop in use in England since 2015
88 votes -
Campaign launched on Thursday to boycott the Faroe Islands over their highly controversial slaughter of pilot whales and dolphins
38 votes -
Decades of public messages about recycling in the US have crowded out discussion and implementation of more sustainable ways to manage waste
33 votes -
Electric vehicles are sending toxic tire particles into the water, soil, and air
19 votes -
Danish environmental campaigner Merijn Tinga has windsurfed up the Thames to return plastic bottles from the UK which he found in Sweden
10 votes -
Manmade horrors beyond our comprehension
14 votes -
Who really wants megastructure cites?
3 votes -
Air travel is profoundly bad for the environment but one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. Can green technologies make a difference before it’s too late?
https://www.noemamag.com/the-seductive-vision-of-green-aviation/ Picture yourself in an airship pushing into the northern latitudes. From the vantage of a barstool in the center of a luxurious...
https://www.noemamag.com/the-seductive-vision-of-green-aviation/
Picture yourself in an airship pushing into the northern latitudes. From the vantage of a barstool in the center of a luxurious lounge, you look through panoramic windows to see an Arctic vista scroll past. The ride is as smooth as a cruise liner cutting through a mirror sea. Above you is a white canopy, the base of the great bladder of gas keeping you airborne. Down below, a huge oval shadow glides across the pack ice.
I disembarked from this flight of fancy and came back to reality in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town of Bedford, a couple hours north of London. For now, the airship of my imagination sat disassembled in front of me — an engine, the top section of a tail fin, a salubrious sample cabin.
Hybrid Air Vehicles calls it the Airlander: a colossal, state-of-the-art dirigible that was originally conceived as a military surveillance platform for the U.S. Air Force. That idea was scrapped as America de-escalated its operations in Afghanistan, but by then a new application for airships was emerging. Aviation is the most energy-intensive form of transport, and in recent years the industry has come under intense scrutiny for its environmental footprint. Unlike a passenger airplane, a passenger airship — buoyant and slow — doesn’t have to burn much fuel to stay in the air.
“We’ve completely normalized flying in an aluminum tube at 500 miles an hour, but I think we’ve got some big changes coming,” said Tom Grundy, an aerospace engineer and HAV’s CEO, who was showing me around the research facility.
Many of the scientific principles behind Grundy’s airship are a throwback to a bygone age, when Goodyears and Zeppelins carried affluent clientele around America and Europe and occasionally between the two. Other aspects are cutting-edge. The cambered twin hulls will be inflated with 1.2 million cubic feet of inert helium, not flammable hydrogen like most of the Airlander’s interwar forebears. The skin, a composite of tenacious, space-age materials, is barely a tenth of an inch thick but so strong that there is no need for any internal skeleton. Grundy handed me a handkerchief-sized off-cut. “You could probably hang an SUV off that,” he said. When it goes into production later this year, it will be the world’s largest commercial airliner: around 300 feet long, nearly the length of a soccer field.
But arguably its key selling point — the reason HAV resuscitated a mode of aerial transport once thought to have gone down in flames with the Hindenburg — is that it’s green. Even powered by today’s kerosene-based jet fuel, the total emissions per kilometer from its four vectored engines will be 75% less than a conventional narrow-bodied jet covering the same distance. The Airlander of course is much slower. A maximum velocity of under 100mph means that it’s never going to compete directly with jet airliners. “We tend to think of it as sitting between the air and ground markets — a railway carriage for the skies,” Grundy told me.
“When it enters service, perhaps as soon as 2026, the Airlander will offer premium, multi-day cruises to hard-to-reach places like the Arctic Circle.”
A 100-seat cabin designed for regional travel has already attracted orders from carriers in Spain and Scotland. The prototype we were sitting in, with a futuristic carbon-fiber profile and wine glasses dangling above a wraparound bar, is the central section of another configuration called the “expedition payload module.” When it enters service, perhaps as soon as 2026, it will offer premium, multi-day cruises to hard-to-reach places like the Arctic Circle. Behind the communal lounge, a central corridor will lead to eight double ensuite bedrooms. “You’ll even be able to open the windows,” Grundy said.
35 votes -
Oil is hard to quit, even in Norway where electric cars rule the road
15 votes -
Why is desalination so difficult? An overview of seawater desalination: Removing salt to make drinkable water from the ocean.
15 votes -
Can EV batteries be recycled? It’s complicated, but it’s already happening
8 votes -
Fukushima contaminated water set to be released into the ocean
13 votes -
Denmark sets new record - month of June has been the most sunny since records began
11 votes -
Why millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed
18 votes -
Australian governments impose recycling rules after the packaging industry fails on waste
7 votes -
How US Supreme Court’s EPA ruling might affect wetlands, clean water
5 votes -
$25 million has been allocated to transfer more bison from federal to tribal lands and forge management agreements with tribes
5 votes -
The world’s longest suspension bridge is history in the making. After 2,000 years of political and technical hitches, Italy says it’s finally ready to connect Sicily to the mainland.
8 votes -
Norway wants to raise taxes on its aquaculture industry, which could provide a model for how to better manage the marine environment
4 votes -
What’s the real cost of mezcal?
9 votes -
Producers of the latest Mission: Impossible film have dropped their attempt to obtain permission for dozens of helicopter landings on Svalbard
3 votes -
Micro datacenters begin trials as commercial heating units
19 votes -
There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than originally reported, data shows
18 votes -
California fires back at other Western states with its own Colorado River plan
9 votes -
Brazil launches first anti-deforestation raids under Lula bid to protect Amazon
8 votes -
Would you fall for it? General Motors' propaganda video from the 1950s.
8 votes -
The superheroes of beautiful Kinshasa
3 votes -
The insane scale of Europe's new mega-tunnel – Denmark is building a record-breaking tunnel to Germany
3 votes -
Gothenburg is on a $100bn building spree
6 votes -
Is Helsinki city centre's new neighbourhood, Wood City, the future of building? Developers are increasingly swapping out concrete and steel in favour of wood
8 votes -
Dairy co-operative Arla Foods has announced it will pay its farmers more money for the milk they produce if they meet new environmental sustainability targets
7 votes -
Australia to set aside at least 30% of its land mass to protect endangered species
11 votes