Sailing ships are back in vogue as a green alternative to conventional shipping
Not exactly speedy, but there are a lot of goods (like wine) where speed doesn’t really matter. Why not use wind power when possible?
Incidentally, one of Washington’s tall ships was actually built by an eccentric millionaire (Baron Dorcy, dubbed “the ultimate trustifarian” in this article) in 1988 with the same idea in mind.
For the curious, sail-powered ships run about a third to a half as fast as modern engine-powered container ships – 8-12 knots instead of 17-24 on average. With today’s weather satellite technology, getting becalmed or is a lot less likely than one might think. Anything you need to send *fast* can go by cargo plane these days. And while the “labor-intensive” (quoting the article) nature of sail may add some shipping cost over fossil fuels, it also provides badly needed jobs.
Yeah, I’ve been waiting on this for twenty years. ^_^ And the current trendiness of sustainable ecology may actually have enough oomph to provide a tipping point and bring sailing vessels back as a shipping method big enough to be viable, at least for a niche market.
(Since sailing vessels have to be more streamlined than combustion-powered ships to get a reasonable speed of travel going, you’d still need some R&D to design one that you could just load full of those boxcar container things and send it off – but I bet it’d be possible.)
