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Cruise Ships are a Climate Catastrophe
The Dirty Truth About Cruises & Their Emissions
Cruises boast many advantages over other forms of vacation travel. They’re convenient, entertaining, stress-free, and, if you look in the right place, reasonably priced. But in a world that’s cracking down on corporate and transportation emissions, cruise ships seem to be one sector of travelling that society has turned a blind eye to.
And it’s a sector whose environmental impact is only getting worse.
On paper, cruises seem like a fairly efficient method of mass transportation. Some mega-cruise ships, such as Royal Caribbean’s new Icon of the Seas can carry up to 10,000 people! Surely one cruise ship couldn’t be more polluting than the ~25 planes that would be required to carry the same number of people…
Well, as it turns out, cruises emit more than twice as much CO2 pollution per passenger than a round-trip commercial flight would. The picture gets even worse when you factor in that most cruise passengers likely flew into the port.
And we wouldn’t want to forget cruises’ other pollutants, such as Sulfur Oxide (SOx), Nitrogen Oxide (NOx), and Black Carbon (BC). A large cruise ship releases ~2.2 million cars worth of CO2 emissions annually, as much SOx as 4.5 million cars, 85,000 cars worth of NOx, and 6 times more BC than the average transport ship!
Yet cruise liners advertise themselves to consumers as being environmentally friendly, thanks to their use of “biofuels” and “efforts” in waste reduction and marine life protection. These are the same companies that admitted to dumping oily waste directly into the oceans. From 1993 to 2019…
Simply put, cruise ships give even Taylor Swift’s private jet a run for its money in terms of emissions. And hardly anyone knows how harmful these ships truly are. That begs the question, how did we get here and how are we going to fix it?
Growing Luxury, Emissions, Demand, and How to Fix It
