Cruise ships

 

Cruising volumes are going up rapidly but it comes at a large environmental cost, a fact that cruising companies are keen to greenwash.

This article from the Which makes interesting and worrying reading, but how often do you hear about this level of pollution in the press?  The article has an error in the table in the section marked “The carbon footprint of cruise holidays vs flying” but the general concept is obvious: cruising is the worst way of having a foreign holiday.

This isn’t just about CO2 either.  The heavy fuel oil that ships burn isn’t the same as the diesel fuel we put in our cars.  The article makes clear it has 100 times as much sulphur as the diesel we normally know.  The last time we took a cross-channel ferry the smoke coming out of the funnel was purple!

Cruise ship operators will talk about scrubbing the sulphur out of their exhausts using sea water, but that’s just transferring the sulphur from the air to the sea, along with other pollutants, a practice that is increasingly banned in ports.  It’s slightly ironic that people living near a port may think they’re getting fresh sea air when in reality they are probably suffering worse air and water pollution than people living inland. When added to the sewage in our rivers and seas you wonder what sea swimmers are actually swimming in...

When it comes to the impact on places cruise ships visit there is another problem, one that places like Barcelona and Venice are already grappling with.  The sudden arrival of thousands of tourists in a short period.  On a recent holiday to Orkney we are were given a listing of cruise ships, how many passengers they are capable of carrying and when they were to arrive and depart.  The reason?  When a 3,500-passenger cruise ship arrives at Orkney a fleet of buses appears to clog up the roads and any place of interest you want to visit is swamped with people – it’s best to hunker down somewhere.  These cruise ships are giving all tourists a bad name.

So, are you considering going on a cruise?  Do you know somebody who is going on a cruise?  Have you made them aware of the environmental damage they are doing? Have cruise ship passengers heard about the climate emergency?