Why not simply put a lot more stuff on trains and accept that it takes a little more time to Amazon to deliver your new gadget? I'm always baffled by the lack of analysis of a "let's just slow down" scenario.
I don't want worse services. I want services that don't break the environment. I want services that respect a proper balance. If it means that it's a bit worse to my "customer experience", then so be it.
You can already make the choice to accept slower shipping and choose to avoid air travel. Dragging everyone else down to a more primitive society to satiate ideological climate goals doesn't seem politically palatable nor expedient.
The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container ship is about the same size as that airship, but can carry 230,000 tons. Why would you replace your current system with a new system having 300 times less capacity? A brief estimate suggests that the container ship only uses 100 times as much fuel, so it's roughly 3 times as efficient as airships to boot.
For your a mere 10x the price of a container ship, you can get a container across the Atlantic in 3 days instead of a week. At the level of demand for fast transatlantic shipping we see at the moment, I think you could do better than the airship on both speed and price using fixed-wing aircraft. I didn't see in the piece any argument that what people really want is slightly slower than a plane and slightly faster than a ship. If there's a sleeping giant of demand out there, I'm not seeing it.
