6 ms·

No mention of how cruise ships are essentially entire cities powered by fossil fuels that dump their waste directly into the ocean?

by drewm1980 2y ago

seydor 2y ago
No more than other cities. I wonder if a modern ship is more efficient than the centuries old city centers
- ArnoVW 2y ago
  Cities have vast water and trash treatment facilities, at least in developed countries. Those facilities are at most decades old. Even if the sewer system itself may be centuries old, it is maintained as failing sewers are health risks. Also, cities make less use of disposable items. I can be contrarian at times, but that's just plain wrong.
- black_puppydog 2y ago
  Absolutely more than other cities. These things literally run on crude oil and dump shit (literall, and worse) unfiltered into the ocean. Plus, as someone living a few hundred meters from a harbor that hosts these abominations, I can tell you that the kind of tourism they foster is super toxic to local politics. And, as someone engaged in local air quality measurements here, I can also tell you that they're toxic, in the literal sense, to the people living downwind from the harbor. At this point, the only way forward I see is to outright ban these things. /rant
- pveierland 2y ago
  Probably not. The average EU citizen living in "centuries old city centers" emits ~5.66 tCO2eq/year [1], while an analysis of cruise ship vacations for Seattle shows each passenger emitting on average ~421 kg/day [2], equaling ~153 tCO2eq/year (27x the EU average). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... [2] https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Comparison_of_CO2_Emissions_v2.pdf https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Comparison_of_CO2...
  - morsch 2y ago
    I wonder. From first principles, I don't quite understand how cruise ships can be that bad. It's not obvious to me how tourists on a ship can use much more energy than of they were in a land based resort. Yes, they're moving, but ships move very efficiently, which is why it's used for bulk transport. And tourists on land also move, often by car. Or are cruise ships more comparable to cars than cargo ships in terms of movement? The facilities themselves, pools, rides, restaurants, A/C, theatres, are all also used on land and I don't the why they would be less efficient on a ship. Unless being on a ship results in trade-offs that impact efficiency, e.g. less insulation requires more A/C. I'd kind of expect the opposite, with everything from cabins to restaurants being comparatively cramped. Maybe energy is just being wasted, what with the power plant being right there. Obviously the power generation is 100% fossil, but the power on land is also generated somewhere, and it's usually not green -- though this is increasingly an argument. The crude oil is bad, yes, but also used by cargo ships which must dwarf cruise ships by a ludicrous amount. The raw sewage is specific to cruises, admittedly, though I'm sure plenty of raw sewage and worse is dumped into our oceans by land dwellers. But that is no defense. Don't get me wrong, I have no desire to go on a cruise, it sounds like hell to me. I'm perfectly willing to believe they're inefficient, I just don't quite understand why. The linked study is pretty bad. It seems to get it's data from https://seattlecruisecontrol.org/learn/greenhouse-gas-emissions/ https://seattlecruisecontrol.org/learn/greenhouse-gas-emissi... which itself is based on website CO2 calculators. That's not exactly science. Also, a third of the CO2 attributed to the cruise ship vacation is the flight there and back. Which is fair enough if you ask me, just noteworthy and is gonna vary a lot depending on how far people have to fly to get there.
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      > The crude oil is bad, yes, but also used by cargo ships which must dwarf cruise ships by a ludicrous amount. Cargo ships don't need much power output in port. The main power plants are shut down, usually it's only the (tiny) auxiliary generator unit in use. A cruise ship however? That one runs orders of magnitude more electrical stuff all the time, and that's a loooot of fuel consumed.
- OfficeChad 2y ago
  [dead]
- kibwen 2y ago
  This is drastically, drastically, drastically underestimating how efficient cities are.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Exactly. In terms of CO2 emissions, you're better off flying to a tropical destination and booking a hotel. The cruise ship will burn much more fuel than the jet per passenger in just a couple of days. If you stay on the thing for a month, it's going to be an order of magnitude more. There's nothing green or clean about these things. They also have a huge ecological impact on the destinations they go to; some of which may have fragile coral reefs or other marine life that doesn't respond to well to the presence of waste dumping cruise ships. The Venetian lagoon is now off limits for cruise ships. But that's because it has sustained a lot of damage over the years. A lot of other destinations are still being actively destroyed by cruise ship tourism.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > The Venetian lagoon is now off limits for cruise ships. But that's because it has sustained a lot of damage over the years. The problem with Venice is more that the cruise ships bring in large amounts of "day tourists" - they come in in the morning, eat some overpriced pizza and pasta, buy overpriced Chinese-made "authentic" souvenirs, and leave in the evening, not contributing much to the local economy.
  - omnimus 2y ago
    How is that not contributing much to the local economy?
    - mschuster91 2y ago
      Because the income is spread to a very few people - those lucky enough to own a pizza or coffee store along popular tourist routes. Everyone else doesn't profit at all from the tourists or makes only pittances. That is not enough to sustain a healthy city, which led to most of Venice being left for grabs for AirBnBs - good luck finding regular Venetians actually living in their city.
      - etrautmann 2y ago
        Hasn’t the entire city of Venice been anlmost exclusively funded by and setup for tourism for hundreds of years?
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
bell-cot 2y ago
It's a short article in a travel magazine, about one guy's adventures sneaking into scrapping facilities to snag a few trinkets. A pretty niche topic. From the editor's PoV, your facts aren't relevant to the article. And, by travel magazine standards, he's already slipped in a boatload of more-relevant cruise industry negatives.
lobochrome 2y ago
I agree that they aren’t exactly clean. But the article is about something else. If we can’t have articles about specific topics without first having disclaimers about general issues.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  I see it more like having a discussion, of some things the topic triggers and are very adjacent, crticism of cruise ships fit very well with articles about cruise ships. You may very well add more thoughts about the specific one, about saving historic cruise ships to improve the balance.
- paulgb 2y ago
  Also, the article does touch on the environmental and human-rights issues of shipbreaking.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Well since they are not clean; what's the point in trying to preserve them? I'd argue getting rid of them is a good thing. Especially the older more inefficient ones.
  - lobochrome 2y ago
    Read the article
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
biddendidden 2y ago
[dead]

No mention of how cruise ships are essentially entire cities powered by fossil fuels that dump their waste directly into the ocean?

seydor 2y ago

No more than other cities. I wonder if a modern ship is more efficient than the centuries old city centers

ArnoVW 2y ago
Cities have vast water and trash treatment facilities, at least in developed countries. Those facilities are at most decades old. Even if the sewer system itself may be centuries old, it is maintained as failing sewers are health risks. Also, cities make less use of disposable items. I can be contrarian at times, but that's just plain wrong.
black_puppydog 2y ago
Absolutely more than other cities. These things literally run on crude oil and dump shit (literall, and worse) unfiltered into the ocean. Plus, as someone living a few hundred meters from a harbor that hosts these abominations, I can tell you that the kind of tourism they foster is super toxic to local politics. And, as someone engaged in local air quality measurements here, I can also tell you that they're toxic, in the literal sense, to the people living downwind from the harbor. At this point, the only way forward I see is to outright ban these things. /rant
pveierland 2y ago
Probably not. The average EU citizen living in "centuries old city centers" emits ~5.66 tCO2eq/year [1], while an analysis of cruise ship vacations for Seattle shows each passenger emitting on average ~421 kg/day [2], equaling ~153 tCO2eq/year (27x the EU average). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... [2] https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Comparison_of_CO2_Emissions_v2.pdf https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Comparison_of_CO2...
- morsch 2y ago
  I wonder. From first principles, I don't quite understand how cruise ships can be that bad. It's not obvious to me how tourists on a ship can use much more energy than of they were in a land based resort. Yes, they're moving, but ships move very efficiently, which is why it's used for bulk transport. And tourists on land also move, often by car. Or are cruise ships more comparable to cars than cargo ships in terms of movement? The facilities themselves, pools, rides, restaurants, A/C, theatres, are all also used on land and I don't the why they would be less efficient on a ship. Unless being on a ship results in trade-offs that impact efficiency, e.g. less insulation requires more A/C. I'd kind of expect the opposite, with everything from cabins to restaurants being comparatively cramped. Maybe energy is just being wasted, what with the power plant being right there. Obviously the power generation is 100% fossil, but the power on land is also generated somewhere, and it's usually not green -- though this is increasingly an argument. The crude oil is bad, yes, but also used by cargo ships which must dwarf cruise ships by a ludicrous amount. The raw sewage is specific to cruises, admittedly, though I'm sure plenty of raw sewage and worse is dumped into our oceans by land dwellers. But that is no defense. Don't get me wrong, I have no desire to go on a cruise, it sounds like hell to me. I'm perfectly willing to believe they're inefficient, I just don't quite understand why. The linked study is pretty bad. It seems to get it's data from https://seattlecruisecontrol.org/learn/greenhouse-gas-emissions/ https://seattlecruisecontrol.org/learn/greenhouse-gas-emissi... which itself is based on website CO2 calculators. That's not exactly science. Also, a third of the CO2 attributed to the cruise ship vacation is the flight there and back. Which is fair enough if you ask me, just noteworthy and is gonna vary a lot depending on how far people have to fly to get there.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > The crude oil is bad, yes, but also used by cargo ships which must dwarf cruise ships by a ludicrous amount. Cargo ships don't need much power output in port. The main power plants are shut down, usually it's only the (tiny) auxiliary generator unit in use. A cruise ship however? That one runs orders of magnitude more electrical stuff all the time, and that's a loooot of fuel consumed.
OfficeChad 2y ago
[dead]
kibwen 2y ago
This is drastically, drastically, drastically underestimating how efficient cities are.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

Exactly. In terms of CO2 emissions, you're better off flying to a tropical destination and booking a hotel. The cruise ship will burn much more fuel than the jet per passenger in just a couple of days. If you stay on the thing for a month, it's going to be an order of magnitude more. There's nothing green or clean about these things. They also have a huge ecological impact on the destinations they go to; some of which may have fragile coral reefs or other marine life that doesn't respond to well to the presence of waste dumping cruise ships. The Venetian lagoon is now off limits for cruise ships. But that's because it has sustained a lot of damage over the years. A lot of other destinations are still being actively destroyed by cruise ship tourism.

mschuster91 2y ago
> The Venetian lagoon is now off limits for cruise ships. But that's because it has sustained a lot of damage over the years. The problem with Venice is more that the cruise ships bring in large amounts of "day tourists" - they come in in the morning, eat some overpriced pizza and pasta, buy overpriced Chinese-made "authentic" souvenirs, and leave in the evening, not contributing much to the local economy.
- omnimus 2y ago
  How is that not contributing much to the local economy?
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    Because the income is spread to a very few people - those lucky enough to own a pizza or coffee store along popular tourist routes. Everyone else doesn't profit at all from the tourists or makes only pittances. That is not enough to sustain a healthy city, which led to most of Venice being left for grabs for AirBnBs - good luck finding regular Venetians actually living in their city.
    - etrautmann 2y ago
      Hasn’t the entire city of Venice been anlmost exclusively funded by and setup for tourism for hundreds of years?

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

bell-cot 2y ago

It's a short article in a travel magazine, about one guy's adventures sneaking into scrapping facilities to snag a few trinkets. A pretty niche topic. From the editor's PoV, your facts aren't relevant to the article. And, by travel magazine standards, he's already slipped in a boatload of more-relevant cruise industry negatives.

lobochrome 2y ago

I agree that they aren’t exactly clean. But the article is about something else. If we can’t have articles about specific topics without first having disclaimers about general issues.

mihaaly 2y ago
I see it more like having a discussion, of some things the topic triggers and are very adjacent, crticism of cruise ships fit very well with articles about cruise ships. You may very well add more thoughts about the specific one, about saving historic cruise ships to improve the balance.
paulgb 2y ago
Also, the article does touch on the environmental and human-rights issues of shipbreaking.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Well since they are not clean; what's the point in trying to preserve them? I'd argue getting rid of them is a good thing. Especially the older more inefficient ones.
- lobochrome 2y ago
  Read the article

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

biddendidden 2y ago

[dead]