Activists Have One Simple Goal: Abolish the Cruise Industry | Hacker News Reader

Activists Have One Simple Goal: Abolish the Cruise Industry

thenation.com

68 pointsjbotz121 comments

> “Cruises don’t serve any purpose,” she said as the morning sun filtered through her kitchen windows, hinting at another sweltering August afternoon. “The container ships and the ferries benefit everyone, but the cruises are benefiting the shipowners and then the people who save up to afford a cruise. It’s entertainment, and it’s entertainment that’s filled with completely ridiculous things, like an ice-skating rink on a ship. I mean, how can we authorize that?”

That's kind of an odd perspective. Lots of things humans do don't "serve any purpose" other than entertainment. Get rid of movie theaters?

The cruise industry deserves a lot of criticism and should probably get some regulation. Coming at this from a perspective of "I don't find cruises interesting so let's get rid of them" them does not, to me, sound like a good strategy. Personally, I have been on one cruise and I really enjoyed it. The price was really good and I'd even do another cruise at a higher price if that was the impact. I enjoyed being on a very nice hotel that I could wake up in a new place each day.

I don’t think we should get rid of cruises, but I don’t see the movie theater comparison as valid. Movie theaters don’t emit tons of CO2. (One could also make the argument that movie theaters propagate the arts, which is a good purpose)

> Movie theaters don’t emit tons of CO2

Perhaps not directly, but in most of the USA, everyone in one drove a car there. The energy use from those same people streaming the movie at home would emit much less.

I'm not for a ban on any of those, but very few activities are truly carbon neutral.

I think it's a matter of scope. Cruise ships are unusually polluting. This is why folks argue to ban private jets and not commercial aviation. Or in this case, cruise and not container ships.

A lot more people get "value" from Fox News vs. HN; ban the latter to save resources and those people can go do some productive with the time they're currently wasting.

Again: That's not a helpful comparison. Cruise ships have absolutely ridiculous emissions. HN does not.

This makes sense to me as an argument. People downvoting this because they disagree is pretty sad.

Everyone drove a car to the theater to sit sedentary for 3+ hours and eat garbage food before driving home. Lots of societal bad there; why do you get to decide?

Things you listed are parts of Murican way of life, not a part of cinema experience. Ppl around the world mostly use bikes or public transit or at least taxi to go to the cinema. In my local cinema they serve nice salads beside traditional pop-corn.

You have to look at the whole picture. The people who drive to the theater emit CO2. Same for car racing. I bet the emissions caused by the race cars are dwarfed by the emissions of people driving to any larger music concert.

Most movie theatres propagate nonsense superhero stories. Lots of CO2 emitted in the creation of those. I guess we should delete movie theatres along with everything else.

The problem with all such arguments as they are fundamentally nihilistic in the final analysis.

If CO2 is the concern then include the CO2 in the price via a CO2 tax (or a per person CO2 budget if you want something objectively worse but more intuitive, then people can save up their CO2 credits for a cruise if they really want a once in a lifetime thing).

I’ve never been on a cruise and I don’t ever particularly want to go, but these activists sound like a bunch of miserable bastards who hate fun.

My take away was also bitterness and jealousy, the arguments just don't really add up to banning cruises.

I've been on a few cruises, they're fun and certainly an amazing feat of engineering but a bit of reflection and you realize perhaps moving the equivalent of a self-contained resort from place to place just so that people won't be a bit bored when in-between ports might be a bit egregious in the scheme of things. Do people really need to experience up-scale restaurants, casinos, roller coasters, zip-lines, skating rinks, musicals, comedy shows, etc while at sea? Combine that with the cruise industries' general poor track record of worker mistreatment, at the very least some much heavier regulation seems warranted. I'm guessing eventually cruises will go the way of orca shows in popularity.

The problem with this type of argument is it always circles back. For example, what is the purpose of the 58 year old painters art? Hmmm, it doesn't seem like the painter is serving any purpose.

The crux of the argument is, there is no such thing as an objective purpose. Nothing in the universe has such a property in the final analysis. Thus purpose must be defined by individuals.

Everyone thinks the things they don't personally enjoy or benefit from are the ripest targets for regulation (if not outright elimination). Just like everyone thinks that their (or quite often their parents') choices of where to live and how to get around should be easy for everyone else to adopt. Sometimes those preferences happen to be consistent with environmental or other concerns, but that's rarely the real motivation. People just like to look down on other people. The difference is apparent when you consider that the "activists" have generally not thought for one minute about what it would really take to make their prescription real, or what secondary costs (including environmental ones) that would incur.

The interviewed activist is a painter. I would put painting and cruising in same bucket of utility. And that both have value because they provide happiness.

Not everyone thinks that. Come now. I and many other people can honestly say we never woke up in the morning filled with zeal to ban out regulate someone else's entertainment.

Most people lack a generalised sense of empathy. They can empathise with people who are missing out on things they (the observers) also would want but don't really care if someone is missing something they (the observers) don't care for.

Applies equally well to parks, pets, porn, cars, cycleroutes, childcare...

> "I mean, how can we authorize that?”

Wow, she's saying the quiet part out loud. No, we don't need her goddamn permission if we want to ice skate in a boat. That sounds awesome.

Agreed. At what price do you think cruises internalize the externalized costs?

I think the strongest version of the activists' case is the economic one, which is something like: the cruise ships benefit the region by bringing tourists and (presumably) paying some direct fees to dock there, but this benefit is lower than the public cost of them belching pollutants into the air, and banning cruise ships is more realistic then passing the more nuanced taxes that would correctly penalize these negative externalities.

The weakest version is the aesthetic classist one that cruise ships are tacky. I have the same opinion, but convincing people that the thing they like is lame doesn't seem like a great tactic.

Agree. Italy has in the past deployed the military to keep cruise ships and their tourists out of Venice. Because even if you deny them from docking there, they'll just dock somewhere close by and charter a bus. Lots of 1-day-tourists means lots of dirt and trash and dangerously crowded roads in and out of the city. And since most cruise ships are all-inclusive, those tourists pretty much won't buy anything. They stay exactly 1 night at each location, so they cannot even afford to buy a meaningful souvenir because then they won't have budget left for souvenirs at the next 10 stops.

So yes, "cruise ship tourists ruin the economy" is probably the best argument for getting the locals on your side.

What's the pollutant cost of flying the equivalent number of tourists there? I would have thought, naively, that boats are way more efficient than jet engines, even after hauling casinos and swimming pools along for the ride.

I wonder if "don't run your power plants when docked, buy local electricity instead" is a reasonable rule.

I too think cruise ships are tacky, but when I examine that reaction I find it really hard to justify. I think it might just be a classist thing on my part.

I doubted the claims around here, so I tried to get some numbers from a DDG search.

I didn't find anything definitive, but looks like cruise ships spend something on the order of 100kg of fuel per passenger-day. This is completely out of line from any kind of transportation (with speeds on the order of 40km/h).

Their main issues are that they use a huge amount of electricity, and that they run way too fast for a ship.

Thanks for finding that. So we're talking about 100 passenger/km for 12 litres of fuel (very roughly). That's.... 10-20% worse than an SUV with a single occupant? Double a fuel-efficient car? And apparently 3-4x a commercial jet.

With all the other problems people have mentioned, I can see why air passengers would be far more desirable from the destination's point of view.

The "on the order of" on my comment is load-bearing.

I've found a lot of things from 400 l/pass*day to 100 l/pass*day, and 20 km/h to 40 km/h.

The higher speeds tend to come with the highest fuel consumption. But I couldn't find good info on the correlation between them. So, they probably consume a few times more fuel than a SUV, and closer to 10 times more than a jet, but I can't get you any precision at all.

From the featured article:

> Another study released in April by the US environmental group Friends of the Earth found that passengers on a typical cruise ship each emit roughly 421 kg of carbon dioxide a day—more than one does on a typical one-way flight from New York to Los Angeles.

> banning cruise ships is more realistic then passing the more nuanced taxes that would correctly penalize these negative externalities.

This seems like it can't be true. Banning cruise ships in a port or region seems exactly as easy as taxing them some big quantity for fuel burnt for the entire cruise.

Fair, I don't actually know which legislative method is easier. I have a vague hunch that a city is more likely to be able to dictate who docks at their ports than introduce their own pollution taxes, but I don't know.

I'd expect that they tend to extract a lot of concessions, especially from the lower-tier stops.

* Were the quaint little towns, the ones adjacent to a natural feature, the fishing villages or historically relevant cities, ready to support a million-tonne liner with huge clearance requirements, even aside from any first-order pollution needs? Who's paying to build and maintain facilities, and when the programme changes and the service is abandoned, who cleans it up afterwards?

By comparison, cargo ships tend to dock at more purpose-built facilities "elsewhere"-- points specifically chosen for their capacity, but you can't really tell tourists "we're docking here, and taking a four-hour bus ride to the actual attraction city?"

* How badly does the town get coupled to the tourist economy? Will you end up with 82 trinket shops but no local grocer? Cruise tourists tend to be much more "captive" than most self-directed modern tourists-- so it can turn into a game of kickbacks to ensure that that the tour itineraries and maps showcase your business instead of your competitor, draining profits from the local community.

Aside from that, a damning factor of cruises-- and to a lesser degree international ships in general-- is the tendency towards "flags of convenience." It screams that the business isn't viable if they're held to first-world labour, operational, and environmental standards, and it means it will be virtually impossible to corral them for things like "you have to be carbon-neutral" short of raising huge international fracases and closing ports.

I too find cruise ship pollution while in port annoying, especially so once you realize they're burning oil to run generators ... while being just meters away from a perfectly working power grid.

It seems to me that a perfectly reasonable solution that would satisfy all parties would be to mandate that EU ports have appropriate grid connections, and that cruise ships must make use of them.

Or impose lots of stricter rules on all ships in ports. Cruise ships will follow them to get the customers; container ships to get at the consumer markets.

The difference is that other ship types don't have an incentive to run their engines once they're docked.

Cruise ships as floating hotels have high power requirements even when they're not underway.

They're also likely to be docked at "the marina", or another downtown or residential area. Container ships will typically dock at transport harbors, which are in industrial areas outside of population centers.

Large ships burn the worst fuels its very difficult to regulate the industry towards any kind of emission standards I think in recent years some large countries have strong armed the adoption of lower sulfur fuels or something but outside of territorial waters I’m sure these cruises burn the grossest by products of the petrochemical industry there’s no economic reason not to

On those grounds alone I sympathize with folks who don’t want to watch these things lumber into their port as people have pointed out they’re doing precious little for the local economy anyways

Might be better off just instituting pollution taxes and not letting ships fly whatever flags they want or burn whatever oil they want. Then if cruises can clean up, good for them.

I can't read the article btw

Pollution taxes are country by country. Cruise ships just change the country’s flag they fly to avoid them.

Tax them where the pollution takes place not matter the flag

I suspect ports need the cruise ships more than the cruise ships need ports.

Depends on the port. It's not like there are two Venices in the world.

This is harder than it seems, there are international treaties that "regulate" (read: de-regulate) what companies can do regardless of the country.

Also in many cases a particular city, say Barcelona or Venice, may want to regulate, but pollution laws are typically at the regional or national level.

Maybe Barcelona and Venice should enlist privateers to sink any cruise ships that come too close.

That is Hard To Do, and not the only problem with the industry (the other glaring one is labor).

yes, but is it actually harder than Stopping Cruises, which is what the activists apparently want? Obviously not.

There are some things that are just plain Bad and should be illegal, like theft.

There are other things that aren't really great for us, but we (well, some of us) derive pleasure from them, or some of us do. Like alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, eating beef, and so on.

The best thing to do with those is not outlaw them, but tax them.

Cruise ships are car-free walkable cities. Activists should love them.

This is actually a good point. What about all the pollution that is NOT happening because those thousands of people are on a cruise for the week? Probably taking flights somewhere, yes? And driving cars. All externalities should be compared against the alternative.

These are great points but I do think this article is primarily about local NOx, not global CO2.

This is HN we like to look for and present the data here:

> the world’s largest and most efficient cruise ships emit about 250 gCO2/pax-km.[1]

> The average passenger vehicle emits about 400 grams of CO2 per mile [250 gCO2/km].[2]

So a cruise ship running almost continuously emits about the same per passenger as the average car. The average car however does not run continuously and often has more than one person in it.

So for the cruise ships to actually prevent emissions, the people that are in the cruise ships need to have otherwise been continuously driving alone in their cars at around 40 km/hour (25 mph) 24 hours a day for the 1-6 weeks they spend on the cruise. I highly doubt their daily lives pollute this much—even given their average wealth.

1: https://theicct.org/marine-cruising-flying-may22/

2: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

Thank you. But what if you factor in a flight? This assumes you need to travel to your vacation destination of course. That's additional miles travelled in an aircraft at 31 gCO2/km, would be 1000s of km that you don't need to factor in for a cruise.

I didn’t, but quite many people actually fly to and from the the cruise’s start harbor and destination. Medium haul passenger flights tend to by around 180-200 g CO2 per passenger km, so (surprising to many) less then a single occupant car. If your cruise passenger would instead fly to every single of the cruise’s stop, they can actually expect to emit less.

However this kind of detailed analysis is out of scope for me personally. I don’t have the means to do excessive research factoring in various alternatives (and if I did I—as a non-expert—I would risk overfitting). For example a tourist arriving on an airplane is likely to stay in a hotel connected to the electricity grid, which is more likely to be fare more efficient and less carbon intensive than a cruise ship generating the onboard power with heavy fuel oil.

I can, on the other hand, do a rudimentary ‘sniff test’ and locate easy to find data for what is going to be the biggest—perhaps even the overwhelming—factor, the emissions of the transport it self. And as such the claim that: “[we should consider] all the pollution that NOT happening because those thousands of people are on a cruise for the week” miserably fails. Looking into the emissions of an average cruise ship tells us the story that—to the contrary—we need NOT consider this.

Ok fair enough. If we stipulate that, then we just need to regulate these emissions because they are getting a free ride on externalities. We just need to say 'if you wish to dock at our port, you must have a boat that emits less than x'. The market will then adjust by building ships that are cleaner. Cost of a cruise will go up by a few bucks, problem solved.

Since it's a Saturday and vaguely on topic, David Foster Wallace’s 1996 classic “Shipping Out” is a recommended read.

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...

This’ll go about as well as trying to get rid of Golf courses on similar environmental grounds

This seems very French, and also very irrational.

Show me some causative data that the cruises cause these problems, and they might have an argument other than "I seem to be having more trouble breathing"

Disclaimer: Fan of cruises (and not initially, but Harmony of the Seas changed me somehow)

Im curious why cities don't try to capture more of the value?

- Impose massive docking fees, cheaper cruises need to anchor far away and ferry in.

- Force passengers to buy vouchers that can only be used in that city on that date.

If they impose too high prices the ships go elsewhere, either a different city or they buy their own land and build their own port on it. While those options don't always exist, they are real enough that most cities dare not push to hard.

This still seems solvable; environmental regulations are almost always stricter at higher levels of government, and charter buses and massive development need to meet those.

Cruise ships stop at different countries as well, if your gets too bad they go next door. There are a number of islands in the Caribbean that don't get much ships. The Mediterranean likewise has a number of countries to go to.

You could prevent Alaska and Norway cruises, and a bunch of others that are mostly one country, but there are lots of other countries for those ships to go to.

But if the people in the article get their way then there would be no cruise ships at all?

They already tried that: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56592109

The cruise ship operators docked nearby and chartered busses. Or they used smaller boats to circumvent the law:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/25/cruise-passeng...

I agree, cruise ships pollute a lot, are wasteful, and benefit very few people, but rely on public infrastructure. We'd be better off without them.

I still find it baffling that people want to risk getting locked up in a quarantine on a cruise ship like during COVID.

Don't forget norovirus, the gift that keeps on giving

The collab everyone has been waiting for: Princess Cruises + Chipotle - Norovirus on the High Seas

As someone who has virus induced asthma where a simple cold can leave me wheezing and coughing for weeks, I was very careful about not catching Covid before the vaccines came out.

But once it became apparent that they don’t prevent you from catching Covid. But do reduce the severity, I got the J&J one shot early on and boosted based on the recommendations and went on about my life - including getting on a cruise to hang out with two other couples we hadn’t been able to spend time with in awhile.

I caught Covid that Wednesday and didn’t even realize it because my symptoms were mild, it really was “no worse than the cold” (fully vaxxed). If I had suspected Covid, I would have been more careful around other people.

We prescheduled a Covid test when we got back.

Two of our friends who were also vaxxed had it a lot worse . All of us said we would do it again just for the chance to hang out together.

That being said, with our current lifestyle (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966) I’m kind of over cruises and I would hate to be stuck in isolation on a cruise ship if I had Covid which I would voluntarily do just to be considerate.

But I am going on one with my adult sons who we don’t see as much any more because of our current traveling (see link). It’s a cheap all inclusive get away just to hang out with friends and family.

Degrowth propaganda

Make them nuclear. Oh wait, the other kind of environmental activists will prevent that.

Cruises are a truly unique intersection of excessive luxury that also generally sucks.

Excessive luxury? Are you serious, any middle class person at least in the west can easily afford a cruise, most only cost few hundred dollars for a few days international trip that has you mostly everything covered with food, lodging etc. I would consider roaming around the world in giant private yacht as luxury if anything.

Middle class people in the west live a life of luxury by most people's standards.

By that reductive standard, everything and nothing are luxuries, depending on the context. Both OPs said “excessive luxury” and the context is: the regions/economies cruise ships generally operate in; western, developed countries.

By that standard, you can say even the working poor in the West live lives of luxury compared to many other countries in the world.

Cruises are by a pure dollar amount one of the cheapest vacations out there which I think is why they're so popular. It costs as much as just the hotel room other places but includes food and all the activities. If you try to go somewhere cheaper like Thailand then it's the flights that get you.

Excessive luxury. Maybe? Not sure exactly what that means. They’re sort of lower class coded. Not the right type of luxury might be a better description.

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