Toxic fumes from idling cruise ships are still a problem in New York
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"This place breeds recidivists like a pond breeds scum.
But installing nuclear reactors in modern commercial vessels is a total non starter for cost and security reasons.
- "You said this is a nuclear ship sir?"
- "Correct"
- "Aaand you're not speaking figuratively of the geriatric waste you're carrying?"
- "Correct. We need you to dispose of our very literal nuclear waste."
- "Roger. Please stand by."
Snow Crash?
Many places have rules and the ships switch to a cleaner fuel in these waters, but when they're on the open sea they have no incentive to not use bunker fuel.
Tax burdens are tough to pin down. For something like cruise ship docking, the fear is losing the docking business to a neighboring port. That can change ground economics for voting families, a problem for policy makers.
State or national-level regulation is probably needed.
Hoboken, New Jersey and Red Hook, Brooklyn are roughly the same distance from the city.
Would you as a person go on a cruise when you knew it contributed directly to the asthma of others? At that point, I think going on a cruise from a different port would be the preference of others, regardless of taxes.
Shore power works fine. It would be a lot simpler to just mandate it actually be used, and bar ships which don't use it from docking.
Later liquid battery tech could be a good way for a cruise ship to quickly refuel in port. Other grid-level battery tech might work too, but I'm actually not sure if a boat can cross the Atlantic on battery.
It seems that the externalities of this decision need to be accounted for in law.
Right now the status quo seems to be that we pretend everything is fine even though we already know that it is not. All it takes to change this is to stop pretending it is fine and just say no. It will make diesel engines extremely expensive and will cause people to get rid of them as soon as they can.
If you think about it, parking a continuously running ginormous diesel engine anywhere near where people (or anything for that matter) lives seems to border on criminally insane. Then if you consider that the sole purpose of these things is to sustain and transport a population of tourists the notion becomes ludicrous.
When the race to the bottom augment involves not nations half way across the globe, but two sides of a river, sigh.
Also, that's just ridiculous. No bougie cruise ship passenger wants to be dumped in NJ any more than mayor LaGuardia wanted to land in Newerk.[1]
[1]: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mayor-laguardia-crown-j...
The article mentions (and can be entirely summarized by):
> Idling ships release potent diesel air pollution — similar to diesel exhaust from automobiles but in much larger quantities, and laced with harmful metals — that is linked to cancer, asthma, heart disease and other serious health problems.
The author states "in much bigger quantities", which is probably true when you compare a ship to an automobile. However there are no details on the relative quantities involved when you compare all polluters combined. I'm guessing the article would be much less dramatic if you did.
An example from across the pond:
"The results show that the luxury cruise brands owned by Carnival Corporation & PLC emitted in 2017 in European seas alone 10 times more disease-causing sulphur dioxide than all of Europe’s 260+ million passenger vehicles."
https://www.transportenvironment.org/publications/one-corpor...
That is one specific pollutant. Cars produce more pollution when you look at all forms of pollution.
Ships are a problem, but cars should not be let off the hook for the massive amounts of pollution they produce.
It's an oft neglected point in the global climate discussions because it's hard to associate their scale with a direct human impact like with cars. Tying it to a cruise ship around a populous city helps people bridge that mental gap.
So I guess to make my point another way: if you could trace the damage done to individuals in cities, I think the bigger fish to fry would be automobiles.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to discount any claims that cruise ships are causing unnecessary outsized pollution. Airplanes also cause a significant amount of pollution, but for some reason society generally accepts air travel because it's fashionable.
> “The oil that ships use has a lot more heavy metals in it that have a negative impact on human health,” said Adam Freed, who was the deputy director of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability in the Bloomberg administration. “We understood how important of an impact it could have.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191029005379/en/100...
Cruise ships, in contrast, have very little regulation, burn the worst of the worst types of fuel, and have effectively no pollution control. A single cruise ship is estimated to produce more pollution than one million cars. In Europe, cruise ships emit 10x more pollution on the coastlines than the EU's entire 260 million cars. Etc.
That statement, unqualified, is simply untrue. They produce more of specific types of pollution, NOx and SOx. They do not produce more pollution in general. Cars still produce a huge amount of carbon, particulate matter and VOCs.
Ship pollution does need to be addressed, but this sentiment comes dangerously close to letting cars off the hook for the massive amounts of pollution they produce.
VOCs -- irrelevant to this conversation.
SOx, NOs, Particulate Matter -- A single cruise ship is worse than a million cars. The cruise ship industry absolutely eclipses cars by a magnitude+.
Carbon -- cars produce a lot of greenhouse gases. That isn't an air quality issue, though, which is the topic that we're talking about.
Cruise ships are an absolute disaster ecologically. Cars are bad, but again because cars are bad we have made incredible progress.
Cars are a bigger contributor to climate change than ships and in most geographical areas where people live, they are a bigger contributor to poor air quality than ships.
No one gave a pass to cars. But the cold, hard truth is that for air quality pollution of all sorts, cars have improved dramatically[1]. Cruise ships have not.
[1] - Even in Europe where diesel is far more prevalent, and the problems it brings. A relatively tiny cruise ship industry still eclipses the car industry for every variety of air quality pollution, by a magnitude plus.
The statement I'm refuting is this, which says "pollution" twice with no further qualification.
But ya, we need to do more.
That being said, the calculation that a cruise ship generating its own power emits as much SO2 as 34400 idling trucks seems to hold up.