
Carnival Cruises emits ten times more sulphur oxide than all of Europe’s cars - perfunctory
https://ecohustler.com/article/one-corporation-to-pollute-them-all/
======
smachiz
It would be interesting to compare Carnival to the actual freight/crude
vessels.

I have to imagine that all of that dwarfs carnival by a wide, wide margin.

But with flags of convenience, this is actually a semi-tough battle to fight,
as they'll just reregister the ships somewhere else.

The low sulphur regulations coming into force in 2020 should help quite a bit
in that these ships will have to burn cleaner fuel at the very least.

~~~
ijpoijpoihpiuoh
Does it matter how the ship is flagged? I could imagine solutions like, "If
you dock in Europe and your ship is out of compliance, you must pay $X in
fines." You can tune $X to whatever is needed to cover the calculated negative
externalities.

~~~
ThinkBeat
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.

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

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

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

------
albertgoeswoof
Sounds bad - but is this a fair comparison?

Each cruise ship takes thousands of people all year round, who otherwise would
go on holiday somewhere else (probably somewhere far away given the cost of a
cruise). You need to do a total comparison of the pollution emitted by the
cruise-style holidays vs going on long-haul holidays elsewhere and sum that up
to see whether Carnival are really causing 10x more environmental problems
than European cars.

I suspect they are but would rather see more valid comparisons that are harder
to refute as the headline.

~~~
beat
If you read the article, you quickly discover it's not a fair comparison at
all, because the headline itself is grossly misleading.

~~~
nottorp
The article only talks about sulphur which is a small part of emissions - how
do they compare in other pollutants? Since it hasn't been mentioned, I bet
they do much better...

------
LeifCarrotson
I'm curious whether luxury/recreational users of bunker fuel like cruise ships
will receive more scrutiny and legislation than cargo and tanker ships. It's
easy to scoff at the cruise industry and at people who go on cruises as
environmentally insensitive, harder to bring about an increase in shipping
costs.

Also, it's 10x the SOx, not 10x the CO2. Here's the source publication, which
also analyzes NOx and PM, with a bit of CO2 data mixed in:

[https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publicat...](https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/publications/One%20Corporation%20to%20Pollute%20Them%20All_English.pdf)

(As you might guess, the source article is not unbiased...)

------
dr_dshiv
Look for "Marine Cloud Brightening" and "ship tracks". Dirty fuels contribute
to low cloud formation -- these are known to partially mitigate warming
effects.

The opportunity is to design a jet to spray salt water off the back of cargo
ships to optimize marine cloud formation/brightening around the world. This is
one of the most palatable geoengineering solutions out there.

[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2014.0053)

~~~
perfunctory
As a software engineer I am really scared of all these geo-engineering
solutions. There is no integration environment to test them.

~~~
jandrese
"We'll test it in production."

~~~
spocklivelong
#yolo it you mean? I think we only have one livable planet atm

------
tathougies
According to USA today
([https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/01/22/creat...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/01/22/creating-
clouds-stop-global-warming-could-wreak-havoc/1054026001/)), scientists want to
spray Sulfur oxide into the atmosphere to _stop_ global warming, so all I'm
taking from this article is that we need to cruise more?

~~~
tasty_freeze
Whenever an article or person says "scientists want to..." or "scientists
say..." it usually means that somewhere there is a team who has written a
paper with that opinion, and that it is nowhere close to a consensus opinion.
I'm quite sure there are many other scientists who will say doing so would be
disastrous.

So, in short, try not to be swayed too much by what one researcher says, as
filtered through the attention grabbing filter of a lay newspaper.

~~~
tathougies
So as someone trained in the sciences, I'm well aware of this. The fact is
that sulphur oxide is not a contributor to global warming, and I wanted to
post an accessible article expressing this fact for those who are swayed by
similar articles, like the one posted

~~~
Angostura
As a scientist you will be aware that the devil is the in the detail. SO2
contributes to aerosol formation which can either warm (through absorption of
solar radiation on dark particles) or cool (from forming cloud droplets and
reflecting radiation) the atmosphere. SO2 emissions at ground level are
usually classified as indirect contributors of warming

The article you posted talked about SO2 in the stratosphere - where cloud
formation occurs. Cruise ships typically operate at sea level.

------
nabla9
It would be easy to fix this with regulation like European Sulphur Emission
Control Area (SECA) does.

Installing scrubbers and cleaner fuel or moving into LNG are options. They add
only little to the price of the ship.

------
npip99
The article says "Emits more pollution than all of Europe's Cars", which is a
bit of a garbage claim, because obviously all of the CO2 is coming from the
cars.

~~~
darkpuma
> _" obviously all of the CO2 is coming from the cars."_

Wait, how do ships eliminate their CO2 emissions?

Re:

> _" A ship, burning 1 litre of bunker oil produces about as much CO2 as a car
> burning 1 litre of gasoline"_

If burning bunker oil produces CO2, as I would expect it does, then obviously
all of the CO2 is _not_ coming from cars.

I understand making _' broadly true but strictly speaking flat wrong'_
generalized statements, but to do that in the same breath as criticizing
somebody for making "garbage claims" seems... I don't know, worthy of note I
guess.

~~~
vkou
A ship, burning 1 litre of bunker oil produces about as much CO2 as a car
burning 1 litre of gasoline, but tens of thousands of times more NO2 and SO2.

------
_bxg1
How does this rank in the grand scheme of greenhouse gases? Not that it
doesn't still matter, but efforts should be focused on climate change as a
whole, not a single cherry-picked gas.

~~~
vkou
In terms of GHGs, cars dwarf cruise ship traffic.

In terms of SO2 and NO2 pollutants, cars burn very clean fuel, very
efficiently, with a catalytic converter to scrub their exhaust. Ships run on
shitty bunker oil, which is just one step above combustible sludge on the
purity scale... And aren't equipped with catalytic converters.

The thing is, even if you legislate that ships can't run on bunker oil in your
territorial waters, they'll just run on it while at sea, and switch to a
legislated fuel when they dock.

~~~
wjn0
Surely an entity such as the EU could go so far as to ban the sale of bunker
oil to passenger cruise lines with offices in the EU, or something to that
effect?

~~~
JVIDEL
Or just ban companies that use it from operating in the EU

------
eej71
It's too bad they can't be nuclear powered.

~~~
craftyguy
Even if companies had to hire teams of government employees to handle/run the
reactors, this still would be an excellent idea. It's a shame it will never
happen.

------
wtvanhest
Cruise ship manufacturers should do more, but I'd like to see the emissions
comparison of those thousands of customers flying to their destinations, then
taking small vehicles to reach final destinations.

~~~
yayana
People fly to cruises so frequently that it is part of a the package system.

------
graycat
How does what Carnival do with sulfur compare with (i) the rest of shipping,
(ii) the rest of human activity, and (iii) volcanoes????

------
pww2
Look up the EU Sulphur Directive 2012/33/EU please before writing such rubbish
about European waters.

------
mcguire
Don't sulfur oxides act to increase the Earth's albedo and decrease global
warming?

------
czechdeveloper
If we really meant it with climate policies, cruise ships and private jets
would be banned immediately.

~~~
tomp
I oppose banning anything... We just need to take the externalities (costs
incured on the environment/population/other stake holders that are currently
not included) into account and tax products/services accordingly.

That way, you both (1) reduce the environmental impact, and (2) encourage
development of newer, cleaner technologies.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Taxing them out of existence isn’t any different from banning them.

~~~
epistasis
Taxing them to recoup carbon emissions would only reduce air travel, not
eliminate all carriers.

Say that it gets 5x or 10x more expensive, there would still be flights, just
far less common. And maybe then something like biokerosene becomes cost
effective, driving down costs more.

~~~
Spivak
Just want to throw it out there that your typical passenger airline operates
at a 2.5% margin. Freight airlines are even less. That multiplayer is going
directly to consumers.

Nobody wants a world where we're paying $50 to ship a package, $1000 for a
short flight, or their grocery bill to double since transportation is most of
the cost.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The point of carbon taxes is that it captures externalities. To use some real
numbers, instead of "$50 a package"; a fully capturing carbon tax on gasoline
would raise its cost between $1-$3 a gallon.

People would scream, but the point is that WE'RE ALREADY PAYING $1-$3 a gallon
for our CO2. It's just that it's not the driver that's paying, it's people in
areas vulnerable to climate change and future generations.

~~~
Spivak
I'm not saying we don't pay for it, but discouraging consumption by taxing
usage directly at the pump or indirectly at the drill will end up doing more
harm than good for our economy.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Having Florida sink into the ocean will do more harm to our economy than
paying a couple dollars more at the pump.

~~~
Spivak
Sounds small when it's the price of a single fill up but $3/gallon would cost
US drivers about $500 billion annually and that's before the second order
effects of making basically every single good and service more expensive along
with it.

I mean losing Florida outright would cost $1 trillion annually so you got me
there. As long as we keep half of Florida we're probably good though.

Let that sink in. $3/gallon is about the same as losing the entirety of Ohio.
There's a reason we fight wars over this stuff. I desperately want to be
better to our environment but these kinds of 'simple solutions' can't possibly
work in isolation. Reducing consumption sounds nice until you remember all the
people whose lives depend on that consumption to live.

~~~
bryanlarsen
It's not a $500 billion loss.

That $500 billion would be spent on something (consumer rebate, carbon
sequestration, debt repayment, something). And government spending has second
order effects too, estimated at about 1.75x for direct consumer rebates, less
for anything else. So it's possible that the carbon tax would have a net
positive on the economy.

Even if it isn't a net positive by itself, the net effect will be a LOT less
than $500B.

------
beat
Carnival emits 10x the amount of _one specific pollutant_.

This is a seriously and intentionally misleading headline. Not to diminish the
problem, which absolutely should be addressed, but the headline is
journalistic malpractice.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
I think these kinds of headlines are very damaging to the perception of
science. They often erase trust and make the public feel disengaged.

~~~
mikeash
I have this suspicion that it’s intentional. If I were trying to sow doubt
about climate change, this sort of article is exactly what I’d push.

------
pmyteh
The devil is, as always, in the detail. Here, the 'air pollution' is oxides of
sulphur, which are a consequence of the use of nearly regulation free dirty
bunker fuel by ships.

If the measurement is CO2, or other pollutants, it's almost certainly less bad
comparatively (though in no way clean).

------
whiddershins
Interestingly I believe the sulphur oxide actually acts to decrease global
warming so ...

