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It 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. Bu

It 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 ago
Does 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
  It 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-...
- ThinkBeat 7y ago
  This is the way it is in several Europen cities (if not all). The cruise ships burn very pollutingly fuels while in "international waters" but when they enter a port they are required to use cleaner fuel. Those regulations are there. But nothing regulates what they do in international waters.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Now all we have to do is convince acid rain to stop at national borders.
  - gpvos 7y ago
    You could ban them from having any dirty fuel in their tanks at all.
    - fooblitzky 7y ago
      The ban would be applied by the country where they are registered - the flag of convenience. These are already usually poorer countries that offer lax regulations in exchange for the registration fees. The problem would be that if one country enacted a ban, all the ships registered there would just switch to some other country without the ban (or that usually skipped that inspection), and the original country would lose out on a bunch of much-needed cash. It might be more effective to tax the dirty fuel at the source, so that it becomes uneconomical to the ship operators to use the dirty fuel in the first place.
      - gpvos 7y ago
        Of course, such a regulation should at least be Europe-wide and apply when the ship is in your harbour (or territorial waters). Taking a detour to refuel elsewhere takes time. I am unsure how you would check for it, though. Conversely, I have no idea how taxing fuel at the source could ever work, since that source can easily be in countries you have no control over.
  - urspx 7y ago
    Couldn't they be required to turn over logs of fuel (type? uncertain how it works) use along with some form of inspections?
- paulmd 7y ago
  Yes, you can do that, and countries do. Ships will burn cleaner fuels when they are in territorial waters for this reason. The problem is they're still doing environmental damage out in international waters. What you need to do is put the foot down and prevent flags of convenience (or more specifically, those that fail to meet environmental standards) from docking at your ports at all. Which I'm not sure is permissible under maritime laws. (or maybe there is some dodge like preventing the ship from "carrying hazmat" which you define as bunker fuel, or ban ships from having soot in their stacks that has sulfur deposits, or so on...)
- cptskippy 7y ago
  That would just incentivize ships to not dock in EU countries. For freight this might be an issue but for leisure cruises not so much.
- Tsubasachan 7y ago
  The newest cargo ships and tankers that operate in Western Europe aren't really the problem. Cruiseships have been ignored for a long time because tourism=money.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  This could be done through the Paris MOU yes. The term is "Port State Control" and the way it works is that when you get to a Port, the Port State, not your Flag State has a say in whether you can enter and leave. As originally conceived the Paris MOU was about labour standards. European ports didn't like the fact that "Flags of Convenience" (legally, "Open Register" countries, where you can register a ship without any relationship to that country) were allowing ships in their register to have crew that weren't meeting European labour standards. Long working hours, poor pay, no healthcare and so on. But by coincidence, as the meeting to sign the MOU was starting a terrible accident happened. Suddenly the headlines were about this nasty shipping accident, and you've got a bunch of people in Paris negotiating a new international agreement, so... today the Paris MOU is very interested in safety, with worker rights being a subsidiary consideration (after all if you're at the end of your fourth 16 hour shift this week you're probably not terribly safe if you're even still awake) but it also created this idea of Port State Control now seen in similar institutions around the world. The US already de facto exercises Port State Control, and has laws which effectively bar foreign ships from doing a lot of stuff in US territory anyway - it could make a pollution regulation today if it cared, which obviously at least the Trump administration does not. But PSC wasn't really a thing anywhere else before the Paris MOU.
dfcab 7y ago
@smachiz, totally agree. With all the cruise and shipping companies this article feels like a political attack on Carnival. Wonder what happened if they ran the stats on Maersk who has the largest fleet of 700 ships in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_shipping_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Comparing Carnival to Maersk is disingenuous at best. One is a leisure cruise line for cultureless baby boomers. The other is a commercial shipping company through which a large portion of the world's goods is transported.
  - RHSeeger 7y ago
    > cultureless baby boomers That's not fair. There's a lot more people on cruises than just baby boomers.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      That doesn't change the substance of his objection, which is that leisure activities should quite obviously be held to a greater standard than general freight shipping. For instance, it's obvious that the environmental impact of backyard bonfires should be compared to the environmental impact of a comparable alternative activity, like a backyard charcoal BBQ. If you compared a backyard bonfire to controlled burns for forest management, then obviously the particulate emissions of the bonfire are going to seem inconsequential, because that's an inappropriate comparison. Whether they're enjoyed by baby boomers or baby zoomers, the environmental impact of leisure cruises should plainly be compared to comparable leisure activities. If we compare flying to a tropical beach instead of taking a cruise ship to that same beach, how do the emissions stack up? My impression is that commercial airliners are substantially more efficient on a per passenger basis.
      - mcguire 7y ago
droithomme 7y ago
> these ships will have to burn cleaner fuel The big freighters run on something pretty close to crude oil, it's basically unrefined. Are they really passing regulations requiring them to run on refined processed fuel? That will increase the cost of shipping dramatically. Not sure if the engines can even run on normal diesel. https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/energy/new-low-sulfur-requirements-marine-bunker-fuels-causing-scramble-refiners-and-s https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/energy/new-low-sulf... Well, it appears they are. What will happen then to the high density waste oil from the refining process that is currently used for freighters? Without them burning it or existing as a market, the oil will still exist as a byproduct of refining. Will it just be dumped somewhere? > researchers expect that on-board ship scrubbers, devices that clear harmful pollutants from exhaust gas, will be the primary compliance path for ships, which could continue to burn higher-sulfur fuels This is probably the only option. Or switching to reactors.
- pjc50 7y ago
  The sulphur can be removed, along with all the other junk that comes along with crude oil directly from a well. Long-chain molecules can be "cracked" to short ones. The keyword is "heavy sour crude".
- linuxftw 7y ago
  Anything shipped from overseas is an exercise in exporting your pollution. It's okay to dump 100's of times the amount of pollution into the environment compared to domestic manufacturing as long as it 1) happens in Asia, Afria, or South America, and 2) improves corporate margins.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kyllo 7y ago
Something that blew my mind was learning that (depending on oil prices of course), a container ship can burn through up to a quarter million dollars worth of fuel on a single transpacific voyage.
- novok 7y ago
  That's really cheap fuel cost for shipping a container ship's worth of iphones.
- overcast 7y ago
  That sounds like a rounding error in comparison to the value of cargo being hauled. I would have expected significantly more.
- Tsubasachan 7y ago
  Keep in mind that the latest generation of cargo ships can carry 20000 containers.
- rmah 7y ago
  Let's run the numbers... a typical container cargo ship might be say 20,000 TEU and use apx 300 tons of fuel per day. With trans-pacific voyage of 12,000km at 20 o 24 knots (apx 40kph), we're looking at voyage times of 12.5 days -- let's add a bit of slop and say 15 days. This totals to 300 * 15 = 4500 tons of fuel, or @ $550/ton => $2,475,000k for fuel costs. So more like $2.5mil per voyage (not $250k). 20,000 TEU's (or apx 10,000 "large" containers as hauled by a truck or train car). At apx 15 tons per container, that's 150,000 tons of cargo. So cargo ships use apx 30kg of fuel per ton of cargo (or $16.50 per ton of cargo). So how much fuel used is to move 1kg of cargo across the Pacific ocean (12,000 km) by ship? It works out to be about 30cc (1 fluid ounces or 2 tablespoons) or $0.0165 (or €0.015) of fuel to transport 1 kg of cargo across the pacific. An iphone (box and all) weighs just 200g, so it would cost 1/3rd of a penny of fuel to move across the pacific by ship (about a teaspoon). That seems pretty damn efficient to me. I suspect that many people don't realize just how freaking massive modern cargo ships are. To put it into perspective, they are often bigger than the largest modern aircraft carriers and multiple times larger than WW2 era aircraft carriers/battleships.
jiveturkey 7y ago
> I have to imagine that all of that dwarfs carnival by a wide, wide margin. Well, yeah it has to. The amount of freight vessels dwarfs cruise lines by multiple orders of magnitude. However, freight performs a useful, nay, critical service.
- gpvos 7y ago
  Partially true. It could probably be reduced a lot if we ordered less gadgets over the internet.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago

Does 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
It 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-...
ThinkBeat 7y ago
This is the way it is in several Europen cities (if not all). The cruise ships burn very pollutingly fuels while in "international waters" but when they enter a port they are required to use cleaner fuel. Those regulations are there. But nothing regulates what they do in international waters.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Now all we have to do is convince acid rain to stop at national borders.
- gpvos 7y ago
  You could ban them from having any dirty fuel in their tanks at all.
  - fooblitzky 7y ago
    The ban would be applied by the country where they are registered - the flag of convenience. These are already usually poorer countries that offer lax regulations in exchange for the registration fees. The problem would be that if one country enacted a ban, all the ships registered there would just switch to some other country without the ban (or that usually skipped that inspection), and the original country would lose out on a bunch of much-needed cash. It might be more effective to tax the dirty fuel at the source, so that it becomes uneconomical to the ship operators to use the dirty fuel in the first place.
    - gpvos 7y ago
      Of course, such a regulation should at least be Europe-wide and apply when the ship is in your harbour (or territorial waters). Taking a detour to refuel elsewhere takes time. I am unsure how you would check for it, though. Conversely, I have no idea how taxing fuel at the source could ever work, since that source can easily be in countries you have no control over.
- urspx 7y ago
  Couldn't they be required to turn over logs of fuel (type? uncertain how it works) use along with some form of inspections?
paulmd 7y ago
Yes, you can do that, and countries do. Ships will burn cleaner fuels when they are in territorial waters for this reason. The problem is they're still doing environmental damage out in international waters. What you need to do is put the foot down and prevent flags of convenience (or more specifically, those that fail to meet environmental standards) from docking at your ports at all. Which I'm not sure is permissible under maritime laws. (or maybe there is some dodge like preventing the ship from "carrying hazmat" which you define as bunker fuel, or ban ships from having soot in their stacks that has sulfur deposits, or so on...)
cptskippy 7y ago
That would just incentivize ships to not dock in EU countries. For freight this might be an issue but for leisure cruises not so much.
Tsubasachan 7y ago
The newest cargo ships and tankers that operate in Western Europe aren't really the problem. Cruiseships have been ignored for a long time because tourism=money.
tialaramex 7y ago
This could be done through the Paris MOU yes. The term is "Port State Control" and the way it works is that when you get to a Port, the Port State, not your Flag State has a say in whether you can enter and leave. As originally conceived the Paris MOU was about labour standards. European ports didn't like the fact that "Flags of Convenience" (legally, "Open Register" countries, where you can register a ship without any relationship to that country) were allowing ships in their register to have crew that weren't meeting European labour standards. Long working hours, poor pay, no healthcare and so on. But by coincidence, as the meeting to sign the MOU was starting a terrible accident happened. Suddenly the headlines were about this nasty shipping accident, and you've got a bunch of people in Paris negotiating a new international agreement, so... today the Paris MOU is very interested in safety, with worker rights being a subsidiary consideration (after all if you're at the end of your fourth 16 hour shift this week you're probably not terribly safe if you're even still awake) but it also created this idea of Port State Control now seen in similar institutions around the world. The US already de facto exercises Port State Control, and has laws which effectively bar foreign ships from doing a lot of stuff in US territory anyway - it could make a pollution regulation today if it cared, which obviously at least the Trump administration does not. But PSC wasn't really a thing anywhere else before the Paris MOU.

dfcab 7y ago

@smachiz, totally agree. With all the cruise and shipping companies this article feels like a political attack on Carnival. Wonder what happened if they ran the stats on Maersk who has the largest fleet of 700 ships in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_shipping_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...

enraged_camel 7y ago
Comparing Carnival to Maersk is disingenuous at best. One is a leisure cruise line for cultureless baby boomers. The other is a commercial shipping company through which a large portion of the world's goods is transported.
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  > cultureless baby boomers That's not fair. There's a lot more people on cruises than just baby boomers.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    That doesn't change the substance of his objection, which is that leisure activities should quite obviously be held to a greater standard than general freight shipping. For instance, it's obvious that the environmental impact of backyard bonfires should be compared to the environmental impact of a comparable alternative activity, like a backyard charcoal BBQ. If you compared a backyard bonfire to controlled burns for forest management, then obviously the particulate emissions of the bonfire are going to seem inconsequential, because that's an inappropriate comparison. Whether they're enjoyed by baby boomers or baby zoomers, the environmental impact of leisure cruises should plainly be compared to comparable leisure activities. If we compare flying to a tropical beach instead of taking a cruise ship to that same beach, how do the emissions stack up? My impression is that commercial airliners are substantially more efficient on a per passenger basis.
    - mcguire 7y ago

droithomme 7y ago

> these ships will have to burn cleaner fuel The big freighters run on something pretty close to crude oil, it's basically unrefined. Are they really passing regulations requiring them to run on refined processed fuel? That will increase the cost of shipping dramatically. Not sure if the engines can even run on normal diesel. https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/energy/new-low-sulfur-requirements-marine-bunker-fuels-causing-scramble-refiners-and-s https://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/energy/new-low-sulf... Well, it appears they are. What will happen then to the high density waste oil from the refining process that is currently used for freighters? Without them burning it or existing as a market, the oil will still exist as a byproduct of refining. Will it just be dumped somewhere? > researchers expect that on-board ship scrubbers, devices that clear harmful pollutants from exhaust gas, will be the primary compliance path for ships, which could continue to burn higher-sulfur fuels This is probably the only option. Or switching to reactors.

pjc50 7y ago
The sulphur can be removed, along with all the other junk that comes along with crude oil directly from a well. Long-chain molecules can be "cracked" to short ones. The keyword is "heavy sour crude".
linuxftw 7y ago
Anything shipped from overseas is an exercise in exporting your pollution. It's okay to dump 100's of times the amount of pollution into the environment compared to domestic manufacturing as long as it 1) happens in Asia, Afria, or South America, and 2) improves corporate margins.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kyllo 7y ago

Something that blew my mind was learning that (depending on oil prices of course), a container ship can burn through up to a quarter million dollars worth of fuel on a single transpacific voyage.

novok 7y ago
That's really cheap fuel cost for shipping a container ship's worth of iphones.
overcast 7y ago
That sounds like a rounding error in comparison to the value of cargo being hauled. I would have expected significantly more.
Tsubasachan 7y ago
Keep in mind that the latest generation of cargo ships can carry 20000 containers.
rmah 7y ago
Let's run the numbers... a typical container cargo ship might be say 20,000 TEU and use apx 300 tons of fuel per day. With trans-pacific voyage of 12,000km at 20 o 24 knots (apx 40kph), we're looking at voyage times of 12.5 days -- let's add a bit of slop and say 15 days. This totals to 300 * 15 = 4500 tons of fuel, or @ $550/ton => $2,475,000k for fuel costs. So more like $2.5mil per voyage (not $250k). 20,000 TEU's (or apx 10,000 "large" containers as hauled by a truck or train car). At apx 15 tons per container, that's 150,000 tons of cargo. So cargo ships use apx 30kg of fuel per ton of cargo (or $16.50 per ton of cargo). So how much fuel used is to move 1kg of cargo across the Pacific ocean (12,000 km) by ship? It works out to be about 30cc (1 fluid ounces or 2 tablespoons) or $0.0165 (or €0.015) of fuel to transport 1 kg of cargo across the pacific. An iphone (box and all) weighs just 200g, so it would cost 1/3rd of a penny of fuel to move across the pacific by ship (about a teaspoon). That seems pretty damn efficient to me. I suspect that many people don't realize just how freaking massive modern cargo ships are. To put it into perspective, they are often bigger than the largest modern aircraft carriers and multiple times larger than WW2 era aircraft carriers/battleships.

jiveturkey 7y ago

> I have to imagine that all of that dwarfs carnival by a wide, wide margin. Well, yeah it has to. The amount of freight vessels dwarfs cruise lines by multiple orders of magnitude. However, freight performs a useful, nay, critical service.

gpvos 7y ago
Partially true. It could probably be reduced a lot if we ordered less gadgets over the internet.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]