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Activists Have One Simple Goal: Abolish the Cruise Industry
- christkv 3y agoI still find it baffling that people want to risk getting locked up in a quarantine on a cruise ship like during COVID.
- greenbit 3y agoDon't forget norovirus, the gift that keeps on giving
- kyleee 3y agoThe collab everyone has been waiting for: Princess Cruises + Chipotle - Norovirus on the High Seas
- scarface_74 3y agoAs someone who has virus induced asthma where a simple cold can leave me wheezing and coughing for weeks, I was very careful about not catching Covid before the vaccines came out. But once it became apparent that they don’t prevent you from catching Covid. But do reduce the severity, I got the J&J one shot early on and boosted based on the recommendations and went on about my life - including getting on a cruise to hang out with two other couples we hadn’t been able to spend time with in awhile. I caught Covid that Wednesday and didn’t even realize it because my symptoms were mild, it really was “no worse than the cold” (fully vaxxed). If I had suspected Covid, I would have been more careful around other people. We prescheduled a Covid test when we got back. Two of our friends who were also vaxxed had it a lot worse . All of us said we would do it again just for the chance to hang out together. That being said, with our current lifestyle (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966) I’m kind of over cruises and I would hate to be stuck in isolation on a cruise ship if I had Covid which I would voluntarily do just to be considerate. But I am going on one with my adult sons who we don’t see as much any more because of our current traveling (see link). It’s a cheap all inclusive get away just to hang out with friends and family.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoMight be better off just instituting pollution taxes and not letting ships fly whatever flags they want or burn whatever oil they want. Then if cruises can clean up, good for them. I can't read the article btw
- Schiendelman 3y agoPollution taxes are country by country. Cruise ships just change the country’s flag they fly to avoid them.
- croes 3y agoTax them where the pollution takes place not matter the flag
- inhumantsar 3y agoI suspect ports need the cruise ships more than the cruise ships need ports.
- nickserv 3y agoDepends on the port. It's not like there are two Venices in the world.
- nickserv 3y agoThis is harder than it seems, there are international treaties that "regulate" (read: de-regulate) what companies can do regardless of the country. Also in many cases a particular city, say Barcelona or Venice, may want to regulate, but pollution laws are typically at the regional or national level.
- ComposedPattern 3y agoMaybe Barcelona and Venice should enlist privateers to sink any cruise ships that come too close.
- glimshe 3y ago[flagged]
- plagiarist 3y agoYes, how could humans possibly enjoy being alive without flights or cruises? There is no way humanity could continue without comforts so intrinsic to the species.
- RandomLensman 3y agoThere is no need for those limits, so why impose them?
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoYou mean apart from the massive pollution?
- RandomLensman 3y agoThe sum total of aviation and cruise ships is not worth discussing. Getting the world off coal use is much more important.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoAviation is responsible for about 3.5% of climate change, so I think it is significant. Reducing coal use should remain a priority, but I'm sure that industry will find many excuses for not reducing coal. What concerns me about aviation is that the fuel isn't sufficiently taxed and that empty flights are often made just so that the airlines can keep their airport privileges.
- RandomLensman 3y agoFuel taxation or slot rules are fair points. Ultimately need to just have carbon neutral fuel for aviation (at prices so that the world continues to get smaller).
- jncfhnb 3y agoCruises are a truly unique intersection of excessive luxury that also generally sucks.
- suyash 3y agoExcessive luxury? Are you serious, any middle class person at least in the west can easily afford a cruise, most only cost few hundred dollars for a few days international trip that has you mostly everything covered with food, lodging etc. I would consider roaming around the world in giant private yacht as luxury if anything.
- zeckalpha 3y agoMiddle class people in the west live a life of luxury by most people's standards.
- ryandrake 3y agoBy that reductive standard, everything and nothing are luxuries, depending on the context. Both OPs said “excessive luxury” and the context is: the regions/economies cruise ships generally operate in; western, developed countries.
- decafninja 3y agoBy that standard, you can say even the working poor in the West live lives of luxury compared to many other countries in the world.
- Spivak 3y agoCruises are by a pure dollar amount one of the cheapest vacations out there which I think is why they're so popular. It costs as much as just the hotel room other places but includes food and all the activities. If you try to go somewhere cheaper like Thailand then it's the flights that get you.
- uxp100 3y agoExcessive luxury. Maybe? Not sure exactly what that means. They’re sort of lower class coded. Not the right type of luxury might be a better description.
- tazjin 3y agoMake them nuclear. Oh wait, the other kind of environmental activists will prevent that.
- mycologos 3y agoI think the strongest version of the activists' case is the economic one, which is something like: the cruise ships benefit the region by bringing tourists and (presumably) paying some direct fees to dock there, but this benefit is lower than the public cost of them belching pollutants into the air, and banning cruise ships is more realistic then passing the more nuanced taxes that would correctly penalize these negative externalities. The weakest version is the aesthetic classist one that cruise ships are tacky. I have the same opinion, but convincing people that the thing they like is lame doesn't seem like a great tactic.
- hakfoo 3y agoI'd expect that they tend to extract a lot of concessions, especially from the lower-tier stops. * Were the quaint little towns, the ones adjacent to a natural feature, the fishing villages or historically relevant cities, ready to support a million-tonne liner with huge clearance requirements, even aside from any first-order pollution needs? Who's paying to build and maintain facilities, and when the programme changes and the service is abandoned, who cleans it up afterwards? By comparison, cargo ships tend to dock at more purpose-built facilities "elsewhere"-- points specifically chosen for their capacity, but you can't really tell tourists "we're docking here, and taking a four-hour bus ride to the actual attraction city?" * How badly does the town get coupled to the tourist economy? Will you end up with 82 trinket shops but no local grocer? Cruise tourists tend to be much more "captive" than most self-directed modern tourists-- so it can turn into a game of kickbacks to ensure that that the tour itineraries and maps showcase your business instead of your competitor, draining profits from the local community. Aside from that, a damning factor of cruises-- and to a lesser degree international ships in general-- is the tendency towards "flags of convenience." It screams that the business isn't viable if they're held to first-world labour, operational, and environmental standards, and it means it will be virtually impossible to corral them for things like "you have to be carbon-neutral" short of raising huge international fracases and closing ports.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fxtentacle 3y ago
- physicsguy 3y agoThis’ll go about as well as trying to get rid of Golf courses on similar environmental grounds
- sausagefeet 3y ago> “Cruises don’t serve any purpose,” she said as the morning sun filtered through her kitchen windows, hinting at another sweltering August afternoon. “The container ships and the ferries benefit everyone, but the cruises are benefiting the shipowners and then the people who save up to afford a cruise. It’s entertainment, and it’s entertainment that’s filled with completely ridiculous things, like an ice-skating rink on a ship. I mean, how can we authorize that?” That's kind of an odd perspective. Lots of things humans do don't "serve any purpose" other than entertainment. Get rid of movie theaters? The cruise industry deserves a lot of criticism and should probably get some regulation. Coming at this from a perspective of "I don't find cruises interesting so let's get rid of them" them does not, to me, sound like a good strategy. Personally, I have been on one cruise and I really enjoyed it. The price was really good and I'd even do another cruise at a higher price if that was the impact. I enjoyed being on a very nice hotel that I could wake up in a new place each day.
- bigyikes 3y agoI don’t think we should get rid of cruises, but I don’t see the movie theater comparison as valid. Movie theaters don’t emit tons of CO2. (One could also make the argument that movie theaters propagate the arts, which is a good purpose)
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[dead]
- Zak 3y ago> Movie theaters don’t emit tons of CO2 Perhaps not directly, but in most of the USA, everyone in one drove a car there. The energy use from those same people streaming the movie at home would emit much less. I'm not for a ban on any of those, but very few activities are truly carbon neutral.
- igor47 3y agoI think it's a matter of scope. Cruise ships are unusually polluting. This is why folks argue to ban private jets and not commercial aviation. Or in this case, cruise and not container ships.
- Baader-Meinhof 3y agoIm curious why cities don't try to capture more of the value? - Impose massive docking fees, cheaper cruises need to anchor far away and ferry in. - Force passengers to buy vouchers that can only be used in that city on that date.
- bluGill 3y agoIf they impose too high prices the ships go elsewhere, either a different city or they buy their own land and build their own port on it. While those options don't always exist, they are real enough that most cities dare not push to hard.
- skeeter2020 3y agoThis still seems solvable; environmental regulations are almost always stricter at higher levels of government, and charter buses and massive development need to meet those.
- bluGill 3y agoCruise ships stop at different countries as well, if your gets too bad they go next door. There are a number of islands in the Caribbean that don't get much ships. The Mediterranean likewise has a number of countries to go to. You could prevent Alaska and Norway cruises, and a bunch of others that are mostly one country, but there are lots of other countries for those ships to go to.
- Aerroon 3y agoBut if the people in the article get their way then there would be no cruise ships at all?
- fxtentacle 3y agoThey already tried that: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56592109 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56592109 The cruise ship operators docked nearby and chartered busses. Or they used smaller boats to circumvent the law: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/25/cruise-passengers-shuttled-into-venice-by-motor-boat-to-dodge-big-ships-ban https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/25/cruise-passeng...
- avar 3y agoI too find cruise ship pollution while in port annoying, especially so once you realize they're burning oil to run generators ... while being just meters away from a perfectly working power grid. It seems to me that a perfectly reasonable solution that would satisfy all parties would be to mandate that EU ports have appropriate grid connections, and that cruise ships must make use of them.
- skeeter2020 3y agoOr impose lots of stricter rules on all ships in ports. Cruise ships will follow them to get the customers; container ships to get at the consumer markets.
- avar 3y agoThe difference is that other ship types don't have an incentive to run their engines once they're docked. Cruise ships as floating hotels have high power requirements even when they're not underway. They're also likely to be docked at "the marina", or another downtown or residential area. Container ships will typically dock at transport harbors, which are in industrial areas outside of population centers.
- paulgb 3y agoSince it's a Saturday and vaguely on topic, David Foster Wallace’s 1996 classic “Shipping Out” is a recommended read. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
- xnx 3y agoCruise ships are car-free walkable cities. Activists should love them.
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoThis is actually a good point. What about all the pollution that is NOT happening because those thousands of people are on a cruise for the week? Probably taking flights somewhere, yes? And driving cars. All externalities should be compared against the alternative.
- runarberg 3y agoThis is HN we like to look for and present the data here: > the world’s largest and most efficient cruise ships emit about 250 gCO2/pax-km.[1] > The average passenger vehicle emits about 400 grams of CO2 per mile [250 gCO2/km].[2] So a cruise ship running almost continuously emits about the same per passenger as the average car. The average car however does not run continuously and often has more than one person in it. So for the cruise ships to actually prevent emissions, the people that are in the cruise ships need to have otherwise been continuously driving alone in their cars at around 40 km/hour (25 mph) 24 hours a day for the 1-6 weeks they spend on the cruise. I highly doubt their daily lives pollute this much—even given their average wealth. 1: https://theicct.org/marine-cruising-flying-may22/ https://theicct.org/marine-cruising-flying-may22/ 2: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
- jaybrendansmith 3y agoThank you. But what if you factor in a flight? This assumes you need to travel to your vacation destination of course. That's additional miles travelled in an aircraft at 31 gCO2/km, would be 1000s of km that you don't need to factor in for a cruise.
- runarberg 3y agoI didn’t, but quite many people actually fly to and from the the cruise’s start harbor and destination. Medium haul passenger flights tend to by around 180-200 g CO2 per passenger km, so (surprising to many) less then a single occupant car. If your cruise passenger would instead fly to every single of the cruise’s stop, they can actually expect to emit less. However this kind of detailed analysis is out of scope for me personally. I don’t have the means to do excessive research factoring in various alternatives (and if I did I—as a non-expert—I would risk overfitting). For example a tourist arriving on an airplane is likely to stay in a hotel connected to the electricity grid, which is more likely to be fare more efficient and less carbon intensive than a cruise ship generating the onboard power with heavy fuel oil. I can, on the other hand, do a rudimentary ‘sniff test’ and locate easy to find data for what is going to be the biggest—perhaps even the overwhelming—factor, the emissions of the transport it self. And as such the claim that: “[we should consider] all the pollution that NOT happening because those thousands of people are on a cruise for the week” miserably fails. Looking into the emissions of an average cruise ship tells us the story that—to the contrary—we need NOT consider this.
- NoblePublius 3y agoDegrowth propaganda
- acc_297 3y agoLarge ships burn the worst fuels its very difficult to regulate the industry towards any kind of emission standards I think in recent years some large countries have strong armed the adoption of lower sulfur fuels or something but outside of territorial waters I’m sure these cruises burn the grossest by products of the petrochemical industry there’s no economic reason not to On those grounds alone I sympathize with folks who don’t want to watch these things lumber into their port as people have pointed out they’re doing precious little for the local economy anyways
- pmarreck 3y agoThis seems very French, and also very irrational. Show me some causative data that the cruises cause these problems, and they might have an argument other than "I seem to be having more trouble breathing" Disclaimer: Fan of cruises (and not initially, but Harmony of the Seas changed me somehow)
- kubb 3y agoI agree, cruise ships pollute a lot, are wasteful, and benefit very few people, but rely on public infrastructure. We'd be better off without them.