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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.

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"All ships shall keep a record of which fuels they have burned. Each time a ship docks in a European port, the log shall be submitted to the customs enforcement unit at that port. The enforcement unit shall tally the amount of dirty fuel burned since the ship last docked in Europe.

"A ship that has burned X dirty fuel shall be charged $Y Euros per liter burned. If a ship is found to have created fraudulent logs, it shall be charged $Y*10, or seized. There is a reward for reporting such fraud leading to seizure equal to 10% of the forfeiture."

Or something like that. As long as the penalty is financially meaningful compared to the income of the ship's engineer, you would quickly start to have trouble getting away with using such fuel.

Couldn't they be required to turn over logs of fuel (type? uncertain how it works) use along with some form of inspections?

By definition the port of arrival has no jurisdiction on what the ship does in international waters.

No, but they're also under no obligation to allow the ship to dock. Any ability to enforce standards ultimately derives from this option.

Could ports regulate what fuel the ship is carrying, even if it's not burning that fuel while in port? For instance, if a cruise ship is burning clean fuel because it's near port, but is carrying a great deal of dirty fuel for use when it gets back into international waters, could the port fine the operators of that ship for merely possessing the dirty fuel?

You could ban them from having any dirty fuel in their tanks at all.

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.

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.

Now all we have to do is convince acid rain to stop at national borders.

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