My stand is, burning dirty oil for people's enjoyment to the detriment of the oceans and the air is [insert bad words].
I said, use sailboats for leisure tourism. Plenty of fun.
At this rate, we'll fuck up the planet enough that governments will take the power in their hands and everyone will be forced to help with the cleanup.
If we don't do something now, out of our own volition, we're all going to end up with much more authoritarian governments and limits on individual freedoms. It's either that or civil wars. No way around it.
Yes, many will take planes and trains and cars, any of which will still pollute less than cruise ships.
There is no downside to banning them and using sail ships (aside from a potential loss of revenue).
Sailing ships have unreliable schedules, for one.
This sentence made me think... how many people are toiling hard under the promise that, when they amass enough wealth and eventually retire, then they'll have time to jump on cruise ships and see the world? Isn't this the tail end of the American dream? No surprise then that there isn't a widespread consensus to kill the cruise shipping industry - as you have people burning the best years of their life chasing a carrot, only for you to propose to take the carrot away.
At the very least, the cruise ship operators should be made to internalize the entire environmental cost of their pollution. The best way to do that would be through taxing bunker fuel, but that may cause mayhem with the entire shipping industry, so I'd initially be fine with just a large and very much unfair tax on cruise operators. Not enough to take away the carrot, but enough to make it appropriately expensive, relative to the environmental costs. Now is probably the best time for that - the companies are devastated by COVID and won't have money to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby against such measures.
It's quite hard to tax them. They sail under Panama flags in international waters and are registered in some country most people haven't heard of. They can only be taxed while at anchor in a port under some jurisdiction. They'll happily refuel in Jamaica, Cuba or Haiti if fuel is taxed in the US. We've seen that in Europe with truckers and fuel taxes in some jurisdictions.
The problem with ships is that once they enter international waters they can do whatever they want.
Which is exactly what they do, burn bunker fuel outside territorial waters and switch to cleaner fuel when they approach a country (because they are forced to).
There is simply no enforcement outside territorial waters, and if anyone tried to, they'd be immediately condemned by everyone else.
Is it possible that you are a member of a group of individuals that do not enjoy nor participate in cruises and therefore do not give anything up by calling for their ban? You can feel good about it without personally sacrificing anything and instead forcing others to make that sacrifice.
How would you feel if it were the inverse and others were calling for a ban on an activity you enjoy?
It is very easy to call for a ban on something that you personally do not enjoy because you lose nothing. In fact a majority of the world's population likely does not enjoy cruising, just as a different majority does not enjoy snow sports, water sports, car racing, motorcycles, horse racing, skydiving, rugby, rock climbing, etc..
There is some form of ethical or safety concerns for each of those but the world would be a very boring place if we banned them all.
Of course, it could be that the C-H bonds contribute much more to the energy released by burning the fuel than the C-C. But this doesn't seem to be case. Here's a paper in favour of switching to lighter fuels for ships: it argues that the total supply chain CO2 contribution would be higher (it takes energy to refine those fuels), but only by 1%.
I think that "bunker fuel is really bad and ships switching to lighter cleaner fuels is important for the environment" is a seductively easy but bad target for carbon reduction. There are way better places to spend our efforts.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3155/1047-3289.58.4.5...
The easiest, most economically efficient, most productive way to do it is to tax the C content of fuels. Use the monies raised to subsidize green energy.
Banning is an indiscriminate club that does a lot of collateral damage.
The regulations we have now (no high-sulphur fuels in cities, no leaded gasoline...) are better than taxing only CO2 emissions, even if they're not perfect.
The problem with banning is its inflexibility. For example, let's say you have a bunker-fueled emergency generator for a hospital that you use only when the power goes out. The pollution it emits is negligible. But by banning bunker fuel, you'll have to replace the emergency generator, at considerable expense and environmental cost.
With taxes instead, you:
1. bunker fuel will only be used when there's high value for it, and you won't have to add a plethora of exemptions into the regulation
2. have a revenue center for the government instead of a cost center - revenue that can be used to subsidize green initiatives
Isn't it much more effective to simply force ships to have much fewer emissions or offset them?