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Carnival Cruises emits ten times more sulphur oxide than all of Europe’s cars
- whiddershins 7y agoInterestingly I believe the sulphur oxide actually acts to decrease global warming so ...
- wtvanhest 7y agoCruise ship manufacturers should do more, but I'd like to see the emissions comparison of those thousands of customers flying to their destinations, then taking small vehicles to reach final destinations.
- yayana 7y agoPeople fly to cruises so frequently that it is part of a the package system.
- mitchty 7y agoCars aren't going to get you across the atlantic. And planes tend to be more efficient overall than cars in long hauls efficiency wise, both in people carried, and overall efficiency/emissions. Those turbofans are much more efficient at approaching the carnot limit than your small car engine is. Scale matters.
- czechdeveloper 7y agoIf we really meant it with climate policies, cruise ships and private jets would be banned immediately.
- bwb 7y agoWe could also just make them a lot cleaner too :), it doesn't have to be a binary choice.
- tomp 7y agoI oppose banning anything... We just need to take the externalities (costs incured on the environment/population/other stake holders that are currently not included) into account and tax products/services accordingly. That way, you both (1) reduce the environmental impact, and (2) encourage development of newer, cleaner technologies.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoTaxing them out of existence isn’t any different from banning them.
- LaughingMan11 7y agoThe general idea is that if you tax or price in the cost of doing the bad thing, these companies will try to optimize those costs down for the good of their shareholders, which would be a win-win. In the real world, you'll probably have a lot of cover up of this sort of thing, as the companies would find it cheaper just to not report they dumped pollution into the environment than to report it and have to pay for it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-...
- epistasis 7y agoTaxing them to recoup carbon emissions would only reduce air travel, not eliminate all carriers. Say that it gets 5x or 10x more expensive, there would still be flights, just far less common. And maybe then something like biokerosene becomes cost effective, driving down costs more.
- Spivak 7y agoJust want to throw it out there that your typical passenger airline operates at a 2.5% margin. Freight airlines are even less. That multiplayer is going directly to consumers. Nobody wants a world where we're paying $50 to ship a package, $1000 for a short flight, or their grocery bill to double since transportation is most of the cost.
- Ennis 7y agoThere is no reason to ban them. Charge the emissions to influence behaviour and investments. We don't know what innovations can come out of this if enough pressure is applied.
- mooseburger 7y agoYeah, it's something that gives me pause about political action against global warming: how many people who want such political action are willing to never ride a plane or a cruise ship ever again? I think few have processed that a real effort to address this problem would involve real personal sacrifice, it can't be conveniently resolved just by building a ton of solar panels and windmills.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoCruise ships contribute almost nothing to global warming. There may be other reasons to ban them, but global warming isn't one of them.
- Symmetry 7y agoThe pollution that the article is talking about, sulfur dioxide, isn't a component of climate change and actually tends to cool the Earth down. The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cruise ships is far lower than that emitted by cars and in terms of carbon emissions per kilometer traveled per passenger cruise ships are pretty clean compared to other forms of transportation.
- cm2012 7y agoCruise ships are almost certainly cleaner than commercial air travel as a whole. It takes a lot less energy to move a big ship with 4000 people sideways on water at 50 MPH than to lift people into the sky in 20 groups of 200 at 600 MPH. And these are close to replacement goods (less cruises = more airplanes). The main stat on this article is dumb because cars don't really emit sulphur oxide, so obviously something that emits some will be a huge multiplier. EDIT: This is almost certainly wrong, as other comments have pointed out to me. Not deleting it for posterity's sake.
- boomlinde 7y ago> It takes a lot less energy to move a big ship with 4000 people sideways on water at 50 MPH than to lift people into the sky in 20 groups of 200 at 600 MPH. In terms of CO2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/739287/Flying-three-times-greener-than-cruising.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/739287/Flying-three-times...
- cm2012 7y agoThat is genuinely surprising and nasty. To be that much less efficient given the constraints, cruise ships must be using terrifyingly dirty fuel.
- MagnumOpus 7y agoAs a side-note, please be careful to distinguish between local pollution from dirty fuel (SOx emissions, particulates), and global pollution from _carbon emissions_. They are two wildly different things, and often there is a big trade-off where cutting one raises the other (c.f. the VW scandal). Cruise ships, as it happens, are horrible on both measures.
- boomlinde 7y agoThey are very large and heavy (much more weight per passenger), there’s additional drag and resistance, not to mention time, which I think accounts for some of the energy waste. In short, that spending a few hours on a thin metal aerodynamic cigar is more energy effective than a week spent on a bulky floating city doesn’t surprise me.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 7y agoThe contribution of cruise ships to climate change is negligible.
- cookingrobot 7y agoIs the sulphur pollution they're talking about here (SOx) a climate change contributor, or is this concern about other health risks?
- ineedasername 7y agoIn terms of CO2, aviation accounts for roughly 2% of global man-made emissions. This is not nothing, but eliminating it would not be the same as eliminating all of its emissions. Shipping and travel done via aviation would simply shift to land and water based options, which would in turn increase their emissions. It would also have quit an impact on the infrastructure of modern civilization and economy. Banned overnight would result in mass disruption and probably deaths due to inability to shift material resources quickly. Alternative would take years to upgrade the infrastructure and logistics needed to truly replace aviation. I'm not saying we shouldn't consider and focus on better efficiency and other technology in the aviation sector, but there are lower hanging fruits. It would be much more viable in the short term to fractionally decrease, say, a fraction of industrial emissions equivalent to all of aviation emissions. Or improve carbon sequestration technology.
- pmyteh 7y agoThe devil is, as always, in the detail. Here, the 'air pollution' is oxides of sulphur, which are a consequence of the use of nearly regulation free dirty bunker fuel by ships. If the measurement is CO2, or other pollutants, it's almost certainly less bad comparatively (though in no way clean).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- smachiz 7y agoIt would be interesting to compare Carnival to the actual freight/crude vessels. I have to imagine that all of that dwarfs carnival by a wide, wide margin. But with flags of convenience, this is actually a semi-tough battle to fight, as they'll just reregister the ships somewhere else. The low sulphur regulations coming into force in 2020 should help quite a bit in that these ships will have to burn cleaner fuel at the very least.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y agoDoes it matter how the ship is flagged? I could imagine solutions like, "If you dock in Europe and your ship is out of compliance, you must pay $X in fines." You can tune $X to whatever is needed to cover the calculated negative externalities.
- calgoo 7y agoYes, but Barcelona (where I live) would not do anything that could hinder tourist money. As an example, almost no stores are allowed to be open on Sundays by law. But they made an exception close to the port because enough tourists get off the boats for a day or 2 during the weekend and want to shop. Its a hard battle to "force" any of these cruise lines or shipping for that matter, to change. It would have to be a EU law, etc etc, but thats 5+ (probably 10+) years to get passed.
- caymanjim 7y agoIt doesn't matter at all where they are flagged. They still have to comply with local regulations everywhere they operate. The US just fined Carnival $20M for dumping pollution in the Bahamas, and threatened to ban them from all US ports. It's a slap on the wrist, but it's one small example of how they can be punished regardless of where they're flagged.
- jsty 7y ago"Does it matter how the ship is flagged?" - Probably not for large fleets, see [0] for examples of how this might be applied to the 2020 change. Your ship may be registered to a tiny little island that won't enforce any regulation, but there's a limited number of markets to underwrite the insurance you need, and you'll want to dock at major sea ports. [0] https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-shipping-fuel-sulphur/new-rules-on-ship-emissions-herald-sea-change-for-oil-market-idUKKCN1II0PP https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-shipping-fuel-sulphur/new-...
- beat 7y agoCarnival emits 10x the amount of one specific pollutant. This is a seriously and intentionally misleading headline. Not to diminish the problem, which absolutely should be addressed, but the headline is journalistic malpractice.
- albertgoeswoof 7y agoI think these kinds of headlines are very damaging to the perception of science. They often erase trust and make the public feel disengaged.
- mikeash 7y agoI have this suspicion that it’s intentional. If I were trying to sow doubt about climate change, this sort of article is exactly what I’d push.
- albertgoeswoof 7y agoSounds bad - but is this a fair comparison? Each cruise ship takes thousands of people all year round, who otherwise would go on holiday somewhere else (probably somewhere far away given the cost of a cruise). You need to do a total comparison of the pollution emitted by the cruise-style holidays vs going on long-haul holidays elsewhere and sum that up to see whether Carnival are really causing 10x more environmental problems than European cars. I suspect they are but would rather see more valid comparisons that are harder to refute as the headline.
- beat 7y agoIf you read the article, you quickly discover it's not a fair comparison at all, because the headline itself is grossly misleading.
- nottorp 7y agoThe article only talks about sulphur which is a small part of emissions - how do they compare in other pollutants? Since it hasn't been mentioned, I bet they do much better...
- LoSboccacc 7y agowhen I first heard the nwes a couple week ago[1] I was thinking on the same line at the beginning: need to normalize per person, per mile, per year or something, it's impossible to get those number. and yet, they are normalized per year. the number are outrageous even normalized per city https://altreconomia.it/app/uploads/2019/06/Schermata-2019-06-05-alle-13.11.13.png https://altreconomia.it/app/uploads/2019/06/Schermata-2019-0... and the situation only gets worse because when out in international water they use a worse fuel for their engines. [1] https://altreconomia.it/navi-crociera-inquinamento-auto/ https://altreconomia.it/navi-crociera-inquinamento-auto/
- tathougies 7y agoAccording to USA today (https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/01/22/creating-clouds-stop-global-warming-could-wreak-havoc/1054026001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/01/22/creat...), scientists want to spray Sulfur oxide into the atmosphere to stop global warming, so all I'm taking from this article is that we need to cruise more?
- tasty_freeze 7y agoWhenever an article or person says "scientists want to..." or "scientists say..." it usually means that somewhere there is a team who has written a paper with that opinion, and that it is nowhere close to a consensus opinion. I'm quite sure there are many other scientists who will say doing so would be disastrous. So, in short, try not to be swayed too much by what one researcher says, as filtered through the attention grabbing filter of a lay newspaper.
- systematical 7y agoIn this case, a small scale experiment is being planned: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-planet-warms-scientists-explore-far-out-ways-to-reduce-atmospheric-co2 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/as-planet-warms-scientists...
- tathougies 7y agoSo as someone trained in the sciences, I'm well aware of this. The fact is that sulphur oxide is not a contributor to global warming, and I wanted to post an accessible article expressing this fact for those who are swayed by similar articles, like the one posted
- ilikehurdles 7y agoDoes it pollute in the sense that it damage ecosystems, introduces toxic material into food supplies? Microsplastics, for example, don't cause global warming, but they pollute and harm aquatic life. The topic of "global warming" was introduced exclusively in the comments, and now I fear we'll go down a rabbit hole of arguing about something that we think is on-topic but is actually a tangential-at-best point that was never made by the author.
- npip99 7y agoThe article says "Emits more pollution than all of Europe's Cars", which is a bit of a garbage claim, because obviously all of the CO2 is coming from the cars.
- mikeash 7y agoSadly, it’s not obvious at all. A few years ago, there was an article like this about the 16 most polluting freighters. Ever since then, I have seen the “fact” that ships emit far more CO2 than all cars put together repeated over and over again.
- darkpuma 7y ago> "obviously all of the CO2 is coming from the cars." Wait, how do ships eliminate their CO2 emissions? Re: > "A ship, burning 1 litre of bunker oil produces about as much CO2 as a car burning 1 litre of gasoline" If burning bunker oil produces CO2, as I would expect it does, then obviously all of the CO2 is not coming from cars. I understand making 'broadly true but strictly speaking flat wrong' generalized statements, but to do that in the same breath as criticizing somebody for making "garbage claims" seems... I don't know, worthy of note I guess.
- vkou 7y agoA ship, burning 1 litre of bunker oil produces about as much CO2 as a car burning 1 litre of gasoline, but tens of thousands of times more NO2 and SO2.
- nabla9 7y agoIt would be easy to fix this with regulation like European Sulphur Emission Control Area (SECA) does. Installing scrubbers and cleaner fuel or moving into LNG are options. They add only little to the price of the ship.
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoI'm curious whether luxury/recreational users of bunker fuel like cruise ships will receive more scrutiny and legislation than cargo and tanker ships. It's easy to scoff at the cruise industry and at people who go on cruises as environmentally insensitive, harder to bring about an increase in shipping costs. Also, it's 10x the SOx, not 10x the CO2. Here's the source publication, which also analyzes NOx and PM, with a bit of CO2 data mixed in: https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publications/One%20Corporation%20to%20Pollute%20Them%20All_English.pdf https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publicat... (As you might guess, the source article is not unbiased...)
- dr_dshiv 7y agoLook for "Marine Cloud Brightening" and "ship tracks". Dirty fuels contribute to low cloud formation -- these are known to partially mitigate warming effects. The opportunity is to design a jet to spray salt water off the back of cargo ships to optimize marine cloud formation/brightening around the world. This is one of the most palatable geoengineering solutions out there. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2014.0053 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...
- perfunctory 7y agoAs a software engineer I am really scared of all these geo-engineering solutions. There is no integration environment to test them.
- jandrese 7y ago"We'll test it in production."
- spocklivelong 7y ago#yolo it you mean? I think we only have one livable planet atm
- dr_dshiv 7y agoKeep in mind that you could walk to England from the Netherlands 8,000 years ago. The climate will be changing, regardless of mankind. Should we allow it to or should we explore interventions in the feedback loops, towards climate stability?
- perfunctory 7y agoI am not sure I understand your point.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
- _bxg1 7y agoHow does this rank in the grand scheme of greenhouse gases? Not that it doesn't still matter, but efforts should be focused on climate change as a whole, not a single cherry-picked gas.
- vkou 7y agoIn terms of GHGs, cars dwarf cruise ship traffic. In terms of SO2 and NO2 pollutants, cars burn very clean fuel, very efficiently, with a catalytic converter to scrub their exhaust. Ships run on shitty bunker oil, which is just one step above combustible sludge on the purity scale... And aren't equipped with catalytic converters. The thing is, even if you legislate that ships can't run on bunker oil in your territorial waters, they'll just run on it while at sea, and switch to a legislated fuel when they dock.
- eej71 7y agoIt's too bad they can't be nuclear powered.
- craftyguy 7y agoEven if companies had to hire teams of government employees to handle/run the reactors, this still would be an excellent idea. It's a shame it will never happen.
- JVIDEL 7y agoIt could given the proper legislation and strict safety protocols. The costs would be offset by taxing these polluting fossil ships.
- mcguire 7y agoDon't sulfur oxides act to increase the Earth's albedo and decrease global warming?
- graycat 7y agoHow does what Carnival do with sulfur compare with (i) the rest of shipping, (ii) the rest of human activity, and (iii) volcanoes????
- pww2 7y agoLook up the EU Sulphur Directive 2012/33/EU please before writing such rubbish about European waters.