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"Wind Turbine Bridge Colony" by Alexander Thümler.

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Solapunk experiments towards zero-emission shipping

The Apollonia is the first sail-powered vessel in decades to run cargo along the US coast, and while the ship and its technology are old, its goal is new and ambitious: to demonstrate effective ways to decarbonize the maritime transport industry by 2050.

The sailboat is part of an international movement that’s been gathering steam and now includes a half-dozen ships from North America and Europe with more on the way. “We have relied on wind propulsion for thousands of years,” Christiaan De Beukelaer, a professor of cultural policy at the University of Melbourne, said. De Beukelaer spent five months aboard a cargo schooner in 2020. “The wind is there, so we can use it.”

“Sometimes you just have to do it so people can see it's possible,” Vogel said. “Then things begin to fill in and form up behind that reality.”

As international resolve to combat the climate crisis has grown, particular attention has focused on the shipping industry, which generates 3% of global carbon emissions. Unlike trucking and rail, which have always relied on fossil fuels, shipping for most of its history has been carbon-neutral, with goods carried across the sea by wind and muscle power since the Bronze Age. The globe-spanning mercantile empires of the colonial era were built on sail power. But the know-how they perfected has largely vanished, with the last of the great sailing ships broken up during the Depression. Since then, the majority of the world’s merchant fleet has run on bunker fuel, a foul sludge that emerges as the dregs of petroleum refining.

Over the next five months, until the sailing season ends in October, the Apollonia will sail back and forth between the city and its home base, in Hudson, carrying artisanal foods and raw materials for customers who care deeply about product authenticity and their role in the health of the environment. Some of its cargo will be transferred to a Grain de Sail ship and sent across the Atlantic.

Even within the small crew of the Apollonia, there’s disagreement on purely economic grounds whether their ambitions are realistic. “I’m a sailor, not a businessman,” Merrett said. “We don’t make a profit.” The goal, he said, is to make people think about climate change and what they can do to fight it. “We’re very mission-driven.”

Brad Vogel, Apollonia’s supercargo — an old industry term for the person in charge of a ship’s cargo — is more financially optimistic. “It’s a mission-driven business, but it is absolutely a business,” he said. “The whole point here is to try to get to profitability so that we can show that this is something that's viable, so that others will then seek to get into it as well.” (He declined to provide revenue or profit figures to Sherwood News.)

What both agree on is that just by showing the feasibility of net-zero shipping, they’re paving the way toward the world they want to live in.