The Cruise Industry Will Soon Face Its Strictest Pollution Standard Yet: Can Anyone Enforce It?
Photo Credit: The environmental campaign group Stand.Earth protests against Carnival Corp. in Miami, Florida. Stand.Earth
Skift Take
Everyone — even cruise line executives — agrees that the air pollution the industry generates needs to be reduced. But a closer look at how cruise ships are regulated leaves little confidence that a new global standard to reduce disease-causing sulfur emissions can be adequately enforced.
The travel industry is facing an environmental reckoning these days and cruise lines are front and center for much of that scrutiny.
While most of the conversation about the greening of the travel industry has focused on carbon emissions that cause global warming, cruising has a more urgent and surprising problem on the air pollution front.
Heavy fuel oil, or bunker fuel — the stuff that’s currently used by cruise companies all over the world — is filthy. The pollution caused by this fuel contains sulfur oxides, which have been blamed for acid rain, as many as 400,000 premature deaths from lung and cardiovascular diseases, and millions of cases of childhood asthma per year.
Underscoring this threat from the cruise industry, a recent international report found that 47 of Carnival Corp.’s ships docked in Europe, for example, polluted 10 times more sulfur than all the passenger cars in Europe. While Carnival vigorously disputed the report, the company can't deny it has b
