Case in point: One of the great things about this modern world is this: Not only can I live in and work from my ideal setting, a house in the Alaska woods, thank to the marvels of modern technology - but I can also hop in an airliner and buzz off to visit friends and family in the lowe 48 and, as we did last March, jet off to attend the huge CPAC 2025. These things were unthinkable a century ago. 

But now climate scolds have found another way to propose to do away with all this by returning us to a 19th-century technology: Airships.

The new zeppelins would be much safer, the involved companies say, thanks to materials, technology and weather forecasts that aviators in the 1930s could only dream of. And boosters argue that modern airships could offer a low-carbon and inexpensive way to transport goods and travel.

Whereas airplanes burn thousands of gallons of kerosene per hour in their jet engines to stay in the air, the zeppelins in development need a few dozen gallons of diesel fuel per hour, in combination with battery power, cutting harmful emissions by up to 90 percent, companies claim.

And because these craft use much less fuel, the idea is that it should translate into lower costs for shippers.

One could make that argument, of course, namely that lower fuel costs would save the shippers money, all things being equal. But all things are not equal. Today's internet-based retail giants, like Walmart and Amazon, have built their business models on speedy delivery. In some areas, you can get your merchandise delivered on the same day, and even in our rural Susitna Valley home, we routinely order merchandise that ships from, say, Florida on Monday and arrives here on Friday. 

Airships won't do that.

Of course, the construction of these aerial beasts is, one has to admit, interesting:

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) is building a factory in Britain that it says will crank out two dozen ships per year by 2030 to carry cargo and tourists. The French government has backed another start-up, Flying Whales, which plans to build an airship factory in Quebec in 2027 and begin commercial operations by 2029. 

These modern craft are designed to be sturdier than the zeppelins of yore. Aluminum, copper and wooden frames have given way to carbon fiber and titanium. Crude instruments and steering wheels reminiscent of sailing ships have been replaced by computerized controls and sensors that should allow for precise maneuvering.

“If you went into the gondola, it would look like a commercial aircraft … like you were in a Boeing or an Airbus,” said Brett Crozier, CEO of LTA Research. 

But interesting does not make a viable business model. These things must not be subsidized, but then neither should any other business model, in transport or anything else, and it's unlikely that these are viable, economically.

Here's the onion:

According to the latest designs, the new airships would tend to max out at about 80 mph. They could beat trucks crawling along interstates in traffic. They’d be much slower than commercial airliners, though, which tend to cruise at between 550 and 600 mph.

Some airfreight and tourist flights don’t have to move at jet speed, airship boosters argue. They can take it slow to go green.

Ay, there's the rub. My oldest and best friend in the world outside my family, a guy I have known for half a century and trust implicitly, is a retired railroad conductor, and he informs me that freight railroad locomotives can easily exceed 80mph in open country. Fuel cost aside, an airship that is only about as fast as a train doesn't seem viable. And there's another problem: these giant beasts require extensive maintenance, which restricts them to flight within 500 miles or so of their enormous, specialized hangars.

Although airships don’t need much infrastructure at their destination, they need large clearings or mooring poles to allow them to load and unload. They also need to operate within about 500 miles of their massive, specialized hangars: The LTA Research hangar in California, for instance, covers seven acres under a roof so high that fog sometimes forms near the ceiling.

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Now, there may be a niche market here. Scenic areas of the country may hold a market for a certain size of airship to give sightseeing tours. Hereabouts, Denali fly-bys are popular with tourists, but your typical airplane used can seat at best four to six passengers; an airship might carry a hundred. And with the newer models, we don't have that pesky hydrogen problem.

From the climate/fuel consumption standpoint, these boondoggles are once more a problem desperately seeking a solution. There's just no good argument for this, from an economic standpoint or a climateological standpoint. They aren't economically viable for the kind of passenger travel that the traditional airlines handle with aplomb, and they are too slow for today's high-speed merchandise delivery markets. They are, at most, a niche-market curiosity, and that's how they should remain.