Preserving the history of retiring cruise ships
afar.com
afar.com
The government loved having big fast ships it could requisition as troup carriers. The two queens were too fast to be intercepted by uboats. Mary moved 800k troups in WW2
As late as 1982 the Canberra was requisitioned and sent to the Falkland Islands conflict.
And talking with someone (at a museum, or something, I don't recall) they mentioned something like "Yea, we think we all of the locomotives tracked down, but there's always the chance one might be in someones private collection somewhere."
And I just have to marvel at the idea that someone, somewhere, has a locomotive shoved in a barn somewhere out of public view. This isn't Steve McQueens Bullit Mustangs under a tarp somewhere. It's a locomotive!
I had a friend that collected pinball machines, that was an endeavor all its own.
I can be contrarian at times, but that's just plain wrong.
Plus, as someone living a few hundred meters from a harbor that hosts these abominations, I can tell you that the kind of tourism they foster is super toxic to local politics. And, as someone engaged in local air quality measurements here, I can also tell you that they're toxic, in the literal sense, to the people living downwind from the harbor.
At this point, the only way forward I see is to outright ban these things.
/rant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
[2] https://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Comparison_of_CO2...
It's not obvious to me how tourists on a ship can use much more energy than of they were in a land based resort. Yes, they're moving, but ships move very efficiently, which is why it's used for bulk transport. And tourists on land also move, often by car. Or are cruise ships more comparable to cars than cargo ships in terms of movement?
The facilities themselves, pools, rides, restaurants, A/C, theatres, are all also used on land and I don't the why they would be less efficient on a ship. Unless being on a ship results in trade-offs that impact efficiency, e.g. less insulation requires more A/C. I'd kind of expect the opposite, with everything from cabins to restaurants being comparatively cramped. Maybe energy is just being wasted, what with the power plant being right there.
Obviously the power generation is 100% fossil, but the power on land is also generated somewhere, and it's usually not green -- though this is increasingly an argument.
The crude oil is bad, yes, but also used by cargo ships which must dwarf cruise ships by a ludicrous amount.
The raw sewage is specific to cruises, admittedly, though I'm sure plenty of raw sewage and worse is dumped into our oceans by land dwellers. But that is no defense.
Don't get me wrong, I have no desire to go on a cruise, it sounds like hell to me. I'm perfectly willing to believe they're inefficient, I just don't quite understand why.
The linked study is pretty bad. It seems to get it's data from https://seattlecruisecontrol.org/learn/greenhouse-gas-emissi... which itself is based on website CO2 calculators. That's not exactly science.
Also, a third of the CO2 attributed to the cruise ship vacation is the flight there and back. Which is fair enough if you ask me, just noteworthy and is gonna vary a lot depending on how far people have to fly to get there.
Cargo ships don't need much power output in port. The main power plants are shut down, usually it's only the (tiny) auxiliary generator unit in use.
A cruise ship however? That one runs orders of magnitude more electrical stuff all the time, and that's a loooot of fuel consumed.
As the GP said, that excludes the flight to get there. Also it does not include going to a swimming pool everyday, and probably not crazy 15°C/60°F AC [1]. It's not a good comparison of old style turism with crouse turism.
[1] At home I use the AC at 26°C/79°F. It's insane to use a wool pullover in summer just because someone likes the AC at 15°C/60°F.
Because of tragedy of commons. There is very little environmental regulation affecting shipping. And cruise ships can utilise flags of convenience to skirt the little that there is.
You could totally make them more efficient and less harmful, but that would cost money, and hence hurt shareholder value.
For example, we've been cruising on a sailboat since last April. Germany - Scotland - Madeira - Canary Islands. All areas also frequented by cruise ships. Almost all of our electricity (~1.4kWh per day) comes from solar and wind. We do burn some fuel when becalmed or doing harbour manouvers. Since mid-July we burned 140l of diesel, which comes to 380kg of CO2. Not nothing, but also not terrible. On top of that we burn about 1l of ethanol per week for cooking purposes. Building the sailboat of course caused a lot of emissions, but amortised over the 45 years this boat has been sailing, probably aren't too bad. And equipment like sails and ropes are mostly made of recycled plastics, and last many years.
But of course we lack some luxuries that the cruising customers expect. There's no AC, and the only swimming pool available is the sea. Showers are on deck and require boiling some hot water. And worse of all, we don't have the energy budget to run Starlink 24/7, so there's only couple of hours of Internet per day.
Just as high density apartment living is the most efficient way to live on land, there must be similar benefits in a ship. I’d be surprised if the energy consumption per person was much higher than that of a land based resort.
The ships engine will be less efficient than a modern power station, and there’s no zero carbon generation on a ship. That might account for 4x CO2 per kWh. Anything more seems suspect.
If the evidence doesn't match your theory, you need either more evidence or a new theory.
Many many reasons. Cruise ships use some of the worst, most polluting fuel in general. They are barely a step above floating coal power plants. They also have significantly fewer systems to "filter" the exhaust compared to a power plant. Despite that, they have insane energy needs.
Medium cruise ships are capable of over 50 Megawatts of power generation. They usually have about 10 megawatts of constant "hotel" load. These ships are air conditioning a huge volume, extremely leaky in terms of insulation, and are constantly in the hot and humid tropics. They also have to "generate", ie boil and condense, tens of gallons of water per person, per day. 10 Megawatts for about 3500 people is not great. A megawatt can conservatively power 500 homes. They also rarely use power hookups in port, so they will be running that 10 megawatts of diesel output even in port.
Cruise ships also do not steam for efficiency the way most merchant vessels do, but rather to meet a strict timetable like an airline. The same medium cruise ship will spend about 30 megawatts to go 25 knots from port to port.
The points regarding energy intensive water treatment and less efficient movement are well taken, though.
They also have a huge ecological impact on the destinations they go to; some of which may have fragile coral reefs or other marine life that doesn't respond to well to the presence of waste dumping cruise ships. The Venetian lagoon is now off limits for cruise ships. But that's because it has sustained a lot of damage over the years. A lot of other destinations are still being actively destroyed by cruise ship tourism.
The problem with Venice is more that the cruise ships bring in large amounts of "day tourists" - they come in in the morning, eat some overpriced pizza and pasta, buy overpriced Chinese-made "authentic" souvenirs, and leave in the evening, not contributing much to the local economy.
That is not enough to sustain a healthy city, which led to most of Venice being left for grabs for AirBnBs - good luck finding regular Venetians actually living in their city.
Tourism is €215 billion of Italy's income, about 1/10th of its GDP. Rich tourists coming off cruise ships doing impulse buys at huge profit margins sounds like a good thing to me, from a purely capitalist perspective.
It is much more efficient to focus on tourists that live in hotels, buy every meal from local restaurants or at least shops. Have actual time to spend in more than main attractions as such diffuse over larger area. And well have more time for shopping or do it at local airport.
Sure, camper and bike tourists probably don’t contribute much to local economies, but they also have negligible negative impacts, so what’s your point?
I wouldn’t put bike tourists in that group - because they are incredibly low impact in comparison, and in my experience most bike tourists are spending money as they go - either on accommodation or food.
The area of visited by cruise ship tourists is typically a very small fraction of the port city. Worse, the establishments in that area only account for a small fraction of the overall local employment, and are owned by a handful of families or (worse) funds/corporations.
So money does flow, but not really to the local economy, apart from a number of low-paid service jobs.
You also appear to have a very outdated view of cruise ship tourism. What "rich tourists"? These days it is the less well-off that go on cruises, even choosing to cruise through their retirement as the cheaper option [1]. Nobody is going to make expensive purchases as they have already visited half a dozen ports before their current stop and have another half a dozen to go.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10004079/retired-couple-51-consec...
It is kind of strange, though, that I always hear about the carbon foot print when cruises get brought up, but I almost never hear about it when vacationing in general is brought up. It seems like if people were really concerned, they'd be telling people to go to local beaches and not beaches on the other side of the planet, but I've never seen people say "Don't go to Malaysia! If you go to Cancun you'll be creating much lower CO2 emissions."
I get the feeling that cruise ships in particular are targeted because, unlike trips to Southeast Asia, going on a cruise ship is considered "uncool."
This framing is already putting a pretty strong bias into it. Your preferred vacation is something "you've dreamed of your whole life," while their preferred vacations is simply how they prefer to "ride" to a location.
One could also say that "don't take that cruise you always dreamed of your whole life" is a significantly less practical pitch than "well if you want to go to a beach, go to a beach closer to your house."
Both of that statement and yours treat something that most people consider extremely important (being on a cruise, having the beach they go to be in South East Asia) as being merely incidental to the vacation itself.
That's like arguing that if someone wants to go to Phuket instead of an industrial town in Thailand, then going to Thailand isn't that important to them and they should just go to Cancun. You can't really say "unless you're happy with _any_ vacation that has X, you don't care that much about X." For almost everyone, a vacation relies on several different elements coming together.
That doesn't mean the utility of a cruise is 0, it means the utility of the cruise is less than the utility of the destination for the vacation -> an easier pitch to change the cruise rather than the destination. Say your goal is to convince someone to reduce emission for their vacation, how would you intuitively rank these in terms of "easiest pitch" to "hardest pitch" and why?
A: "I know you've always want to go to St. Martin but you should look into flying rather than a cruise because..."
B: "I know you've always wanted to go to St. Martin but you should look into <some closer beach they can drive or fly to> because..."
C: "I know you've always wanted to go to Asia but you should look into a flight to Cancun because..."
To me it I'd go the easiest is A (they still go where they want to go), then B (they still go somewhere interesting), then C (they go to the least interesting place). The latter 2 both pretty hard sells though. I'm curious if you rank B and C as easier pitches? If so that could possibly be part of the answer to your original question about why you expect people to talk about flights more than you hear? I.e. I'm not saying you must agree just that perhaps there is a difference of opinion vs most people driving that split.
No, my is that just as many people dream of going on the cruises themselves, so you can't simply slice that out and say "transportation is transportation" just like you can't simply slice out the fact that the beach someone is going to is in Thailand and not closer by. It may be an incidental part of the vacation fro some people, but the people paying more to go to Thailand are doing it because Thailand is important to them, and the people paying more to be on a cruise are doing it because a cruise is important to them.
I understand that people who don't cruises might not understand that, but that's not terribly surprising, is it? The people who do will pay vastly different prices depending on the ship they're going on, and some people say they don't even get off on certain destinations and stay aboard the ship. Depending on the individual, the destination is more incidental than the ship. This is also obvious if you notice that when people take a cruise, they are significantly decreasing their time at these destinations in order to increase their time at on the cruise, which wouldn't make any sense if the cruise was just a means to get them to a destination.
At the very least, people should notice all the people who will pay money to have a boat take them around in a circle for an hour, and realize that some people do really like just being out on the water (though cruises are usually much more than that, but it's another topic).
I wonder how many people book a second trip.
I don't like cruise ships for reasons, but they never struck me as 'boring '.
They are a floating mini-Vegas hotel. A lot of the same reasons people find Las Vegas fun are the same for a cruise ship, if maybe just in "miniature" (though the scale factor is now questionable on some of the huge ships), just that when you get the chance to leave the hotel you aren't stepping into Nevada desert, you've got an island beach or a cool port town to explore, and a variety of them at that.
I just got off a QM2 transatlantic crossing(which is about as captive/boring as cruises can get?) Friday. I went on a lark, I have never “cruised”(and had a pretty negative view of it - all people do is eat and drink etc)but had an itch to cross the ocean on a ship in old timey titanic type way. I’m also ~30(which might as well be 16 on a cunard ship - very very old crowd) and went alone. I expected this was mostly a bucket list type thing people did once, or a select coterie of people who both need to travel and cannot fly.
My most surprising takeaway was that almost everyone had done it before, a lot of people many many times. It was legitimately rare to meet a first timer, even among the relatively young group I fell into.
The boring bit is more subjective, it was more fun than I expected. I can see why people love it. “enforced” relaxation, no stops, peaceful, easy, etc.
From the editor's PoV, your facts aren't relevant to the article. And, by travel magazine standards, he's already slipped in a boatload of more-relevant cruise industry negatives.
If we can’t have articles about specific topics without first having disclaimers about general issues.
You may very well add more thoughts about the specific one, about saving historic cruise ships to improve the balance.