Let all those kids know the book is in the public domain and they can legally download the original version with the bad words and sex scenes in it.

In case you're wondering, mentioning the sex scenes is to make sure they'll actually read the book.

Tunneling really isn't that hard in most places. All you need is a deep hole on each side to assemble tunnel boring machines. You might run into problems with pipelines, wires and other tunnels, but you can always go deeper.

In the '90s, a feasibility study was done in the Netherlands for an Underground Logistics System. It involved little carts that could drive themselves, and carry a variety of cargo pallets. The idea was to connect Amsterdam's Schiphol airport to a nearby train station and a flower market. They never built it because the financial risks were too big.

More recently, a Belgian engineering firm proposed an Underground Container Mover for the port of Antwerp, which is basically a large underground conveyor belt for containers. It would run in a circle connecting container terminals with other terminals and highways on the other side of the river. This could remove a lot of trucks from the busy highways, especially the tunnels.

The basic idea is that as ground is becoming more and more rare, we shouldn't waste it on cargo transport. Moving most of it underground makes a lot of sense. And we've actually managed to move a lot of it (up to 90% in some areas) underground already, in terms of tonne-miles of goods transported. Just think of drinkable water, gas and sewage, but also oil and a lot of chemicals in industrial zones. Pipelines are transporting more than most people can imagine, and they're great. Trying to move boxed goods in a similar fashion is the logical next step, there are just a few problems we haven't figured out yet.

Almost as well oiled as the Mexican Gulf!

You can't disconnect fuel efficiency from pollution efficiency, because you can't disconnect internal combustion engines from exhaust gases.

ICEs need something to burn, and it doesn't matter much what that something is. It can be carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, or in this case, all of the above. You'll always have oxides as exhaust, and most of those are harmful to the environment. The exception here is hydrogen gas which forms water (steam) when burned. Unfortunately hydrogen gas has to be man-made, which requires energy. That energy usually means exhaust gases of some sort.

You should also consider the fact that fuel oil is around 80% carbon and around 2% sulfur. That means you're emitting 40 times more carbon dioxide than sulfur oxides. With cars, you're emitting 84000 times more CO2 than SOx.

Another fun fact is that the reason "car fuel" (gasoline and diesel oil) have so little sulfur in them is that all the sulfur in crude oil is left in there while valuable "clean" oils are extracted, and what's left is the fuel they use on ships. So basically, ships are burning the sulfur that would otherwise be burned in cars.

It does, but the added cost is insignificant. Say a 300,000t ship uses 300t fuel per day, and carries enough fuel for a month. That's 9000t, or 3% of the entire mass of the ship (numbers roughly based on the Emma Maersk). Fuel consumption increases slower than total displacement (weight), so you'll use at most 3% more fuel.

So all you need to make it worthwhile is a price difference of 3%. I recently saw a price difference in fuel oil of around 80$/t between Saint Petersburg (Russia) and Antwerp (Belgium), on a price of around 500$/t. That's a 16% difference, and that's by no means extraordinary.

Most ships have enough fuel on board to cross a few oceans, so they could just bunker up somewhere else. It might be an improvement for US coastal shipping, but that's not a very big part of the shipping industry.

Unfortunately, in the business world, there's no such thing as externalized costs.

The British needed 5000 to 6000 trees to build a single (large) warship, back in the day. That's quite a lot of wood if you ask me. In fact, that's a pretty big forest.

Ships' funnels are generally placed aft, and their speed means you've got a nice headwind blowing your exhaust gases away from the ship - you're just out of luck if the wind is in your back and going slightly faster than your ship.

The air you breathe standing outside on a ship is quite clean, probably a lot cleaner than the air most of us are breathing right now.

Multi-hull designs actually increase drag because they have a larger wet surface. They are also much more expensive to build and to maintain.

Filtering out the worst of the exhaust gases, specifically the sulfur oxides they're referring to in the article, isn't feasible on board ships. It's much easier to remove the sulfur in a refinery, but this simply doesn't happen because refineries don't want giant mountains of sulfur in their backyard. Leaving it in and burning it up is just the most economic thing to do.

This has been developed and put into use by a German company: SkySails. They report fuel savings of up to 30% in some conditions.

And yes, cutting speeds by about 10% reduces fuel use for the same distance by about 20%. This happens all the time in economy dips. Since fuel is the largest cost in shipping and its share in total costs keeps rising, it's an easy way to save a lot of money by offering up a little time. Maersk, the big container line, has reduced the operating speed on its ships from 22 to 20 knots because of the global economic recession. This is a pretty hard thing to do for them, because their ships operate on a schedule and have to stick to it, so changing operating speed means changing the schedule worldwide.

In other types of shipping such as bulk carriers and tankers, this practice is much more common. When there is little demand, ships can go slower to save money so they make more profit per job. When the economy is doing well and demand is high, shipping prices can suddenly skyrocket. In this case, sailing a little faster is the best way to transport more cargo in the same time, and thus complete more jobs. In fact, increasing speed is the short-term version of building new ships: it virtually creates more carrying capacity instantly. Building a ship takes months or years, so it can't be used to respond to sudden changes in demand.

I'll quote some math I did about a year ago in this post.

Exactly. The "50 million times more" thing is about sulfur oxides emissions, and honestly this number doesn't seem extraordinary to me. Diesel oil and gasoline have virtually no sulfur in them, while the Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) that powers most ships is about 2% sulfur.

HFO is what's left when all the "good stuff" is extracted from crude oil. This "good stuff" is mostly shorter hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane, propane and butane (gases with 1 to 4 carbon atoms in them), gasoline (roughly 5 to 7 carbon atoms) and diesel oil (8 to maximum 21 carbon atoms).

What's left is an incredibly dirty, viscous, and nearly useless goo (asphalt is one other use, there aren't a whole lot). It still has a high energy density which makes it a decent fuel, but it's so viscous (because it consists mostly of very long hydrocarbon molecules) that you have to heat it up to around 80 degrees centigrade (176F) to even pump it into an engine. It also has high amounts of pollutants, because all the "clean" stuff has been taken out and you're left with all the dirty stuff. It is technically possible to remove most of the sulfur from this goo, but that means refineries would end up with giant piles of sulfur that nobody wants, and they'd have to dispose of it somehow. That's a cost refineries aren't willing to pay, so they just leave it all in to be burned up.

Legislation is being made to reduce HFO use in some heavy traffic areas (such as the North Sea in Europe), forcing ships to switch to clean diesel fuel in those areas. Of course, shipowners are against this because diesel is about 3 times as expensive as HFO. If all the ships in the busiest sea in the world suddenly start burning diesel fuel, you can expect the price to go up for everyone. Which is why we keep on burning the bad stuff.

Just needs some reverse engineering.