Screw that. “Give emitters an excuse”? They don’t need an excuse. Buying time with geoengineering will at least give solar/wind time to get further down the learning curve and replace EOL fossil plants.

And as for “far-reaching unintended consequences”, that is unavoidable - we don’t know what the full extent of the consequences of climate destabilisation will be, either! What we do know is that it will kill millions of people. The only way to avoid playing with fire is for step-change emissions reduction now, but we know that isn’t going to happen.

Besides, if we’re worried about the side effects, banning studies that emit trace amounts of it will just amplify that problem.

Blimps would have to somehow fit in. Having considerable air resistance, blimps cannot travel as fast. Being unable to travel as fast, they would fall behind at moving X people per hour - while a blimp makes one roundtrip, a jet aircraft would make multiple roundtrips.

Blimps are far worse than airships; the fundamental advantage of airships is that they scale up well (doubling the size nets you 8x the volume), which blimps just don’t. And blimps are far less safe, due to their gas bags needing to be pressurized where airships’ gas bags can be unpressurized. More specifically, if you puncture a pressurized gasbag, then its contents spray out due to the pressure, which in the context of hydrogen would mean it rapidly mixes itself into large amounts of hydroxygen just begging to explode, whereas unpressurized gasbags will just slowly diffuse hydrogen like piss in water. Still potentially dangerous, but far less so.

Weirdly, when it comes to cargo airshipping, airships are actually faster than cargo freight (not to be confused with parcel freight, which is what post (e.g. Amazon packages) uses). Cargo freight takes 4-5 days, which airships can easily beat via shipping point-to-point.

https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php is another good post about building better for fun and profit.

Isn’t that the same link I posted? Do you mean https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php ?

The rail area gets vibrated by the wheels (which would shorten the solar panel lifetimes directly), any dust that the vibrations kick up would settle on the panel and reduce its efficiency, and anything dangling underneath the train would absolutely destroy the panels.

Besides, if you have the solar panels on the train track then it still needs to be wired to the train, which means you need an overhead wire and you might as well just put the panels next to the train track, where it’s quieter and less vibrated.

The onboard electrolysis isn’t as useful as you’d think - electrolysis is energy-intensive, you need water, acquiring water is energy a intensive, and water is heavy. Like, 8/9 of the weight of water is oxygen.

With current tech it doesn’t make sense, but in a more sci-fi sense I think it does - the sky is full of dense patches of gaseous water, commonly known as “clouds”, and if going through a cloud wasn’t incredibly dangerous for airships then they could just do that, catch handfuls of cloud, then condense it and electrolyze it. That way the airship doesn’t need to lift huge amounts of oxygen from lakes then dump it.

And if we’re speaking sci-fi, making airships stormproof is basically mandatory, they can’t outrun storms and due to their long flight-times (due to low speed), they’re more likely to encounter them mid-flight.

Airships face three main problems, AIUI:

1. They’re slow (100km/h to airllanes’ 600km/h), which means their flights are ~6x as long and thus their staffing costs are 6x as much.
2. Airships still have trouble adjusting their buoyancy - if they pick up/drop off cargo, they become heavier/lighter and start to drop/lift up. That causes a bunch of problems.
3. Weather screws them - as you can imagine, they catch a lot of wind with their sideward profile. And by definition they’re lighter than air, which means they get knocked off course. Water ships don’t have this problem because they’re heavy as hell and literally made of steel, and of course because jet streams don’t reach sea-level. The end result is that airships tend to fair-weather flights by necessity.

#2 can be mitigated and in the future might be solved, and #1 might become irrelevant if fuel costs get high and a niche for airships appears. #3 is a killer for reliability and safety both, though - you preemptively avoid storms by just delaying the flight until the weather prediction turns in your favour, which might take weeks. It just can’t handle a schedule, because putting an airship into a storm is too risky. And if time isn’t important then you can just put stuff on the cargo ship and then a train.

The “hot air” part was nonsense. Most aircraft are painted white (to reduce radiative heating IIRC) so it’s not surprising that an airship would be white too.

You can combine a traditional city with a train system, to get the best of both worlds. It’s not either/or.

The European and Japanese cities featured in this article as exemplars evolved they way they did under severe feudal land restrictions

Ok, how about the city of Pompeii (which was entombed by the volcano in ~50BC), or Tenochitlan/Mexico city (which was built before European contact, or the city of Cusco (ditto), or the city of Petra (which had plenty of spare desert)? Or Venice, or Mateba, or pick-a-town-any-town.

What “severe feudal land restrictions” do you mean? Can you elaborate?

Here on slrpnk.net I see quite a few “new urbanists” endorsing solarpunk visions with wide streets. I posted this partially in response to that.

I could link a newer article, but this one works just fine. Articles don’t have an expiry date, if you have an actually valid criticism then say it.

If it helps, replace “organically” with “incrementally and due to decentralized choices”.

He was originally Australian:

Andrew grew up in Australia and now lives in the Hoboken, New Jersey with his wife. Andrew’s motivation is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.

(from the ‘about’ page)

So just to be clear: a cube truck (like in the top picture in that wikipedia link) is 2meters wide. A 6 meter wide road can have 2 cube trucks, passing eachother by, while still having room between both eachother and the walls. Also, you can literally park a cube truck in front of your store to unload it, and there’s room for another cube truck to go around it.

In fact, I’ve been to this one street of warehouses (literally a street of warehouses, in an industrial area) whose road couldn’t have been more than 10m, wall-to-wall, and I didn’t see them having throughput problems. People massively overestimate how important throughtput is, mainly because the throughput they look for is passenger cars.

Also: Deliveries don’t need to be cube trucks. There are other options - vans, cargo bikes and bike-trailers, literally just walking in with a tray of the delivery, whatever. The smaller the street, the smaller the businesses should be, and the less throughput they should need.

I can’t tell what A.A.P.'s (the link guy’s) beliefs on this are, but generally the answer is either 1) it’s fine (see: the cube truck thing), 2) arterial streets every ~5 blocks (that are wide and primarily for cars), or 3) trains. Or some mixture of them all.

with supermarkets, do we build service lanes designed more for delivery trucks

As a quick aside, before I answer that: Honestly, supermarkets suck and mostly make sense when people are carrying their shopping by car. Smaller shops work just fine.

To answer your question: I don’t think so, but don’t quote me on that. Supermarkets receive… one or two trucks per day? And supermarkets are big (partially due to wide aisles to handle the trolleys needed to buy a whole carload of goods, to be fair). So I don’t think they’re that important.