But even if you go on say an Alaska cruise, which is entirely in the USA, the “towns” that you stop in exist solely for the cruise ships. The stores are the same junk at every stop, often owned by the cruise lines, unless you walk to the edge and maybe get something local or family run.
European cities they frequent are some of the worst for SOx and NOx pollution on the continent and a single line, Carnival, emitted more than all of Europe's cars last year (by a factor of 10 IIRC). Barcelona has started to realise that hoards that rush off the boat, have lunch and rush back on are not worth the meagre boost it gives them.
The cruise industry needs to clean up its act.
Something is always going to be the worst polluter. If the people who took a carnival cruise flew around the world instead, what would the impact be? (And what would happen to the fuel that those cruise ships are currently burning?)
It's still a horriffic stat, but I'd love a nuanced discussion on it!
“According to our calculations, a cruiseliner such as Queen Mary 2 emits 0.43kg of CO2 per passenger mile, compared with 0.257kg for a long-haul flight (even allowing for the further damage of emissions being produced in the upper atmosphere”
So the answer would appear to be “jump on the plane”.
I don't know the mileage that they actually cover on a cruise, but at 20kts they could cover 480 miles in 24 hours and bearing in mind that they are spending time in port it will be less than that. Lets estimate 300 miles per day, so a 2 week cruise could rack up ~4200 sea miles. => 1806 Kg of CO2
If I flew from Heathrow to Antigua for those 2 weeks, that would be ~8000 air miles. => 2056 Kg of CO2
My question is still though what would happen to the low grade fuel that they're currently burning? If people started to fly, and the low grade fuel was just burned anyway because it's so cheap (thinking long haul freighter etc), the situation would be worse!
Carnival Cruise Lines has ships outfitted with scrubbers and they operate in these Emission Control Areas. Lower emissions are gradually coming to other areas as well when scrubbers are retrofitted into older ships.
Personally I'd like it if my home city (Southampton, UK currently) would stop them idling their engines in port for power.
Apparently we don't have the power infrastructure for them to plug in and run their systems from the local grid, so they just sit there churning this stuff out.