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Comment by mycologos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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