Carbon Footprints

[watervole]

I was just chatting to my dad, who likes to do a cruise holiday every couple of years, and we were discussing the environmental impact.

I thought there was a fair environmental cost to cruises, but we were both surprised by what I found when I looked it up.

Cruises are far, far worse than flying.  If you take a liner to your destination, your carbon emissions will be nearly double that of a similar flight (and the impact of that flight is bad enough that I've given up flying), and there is also a massive impact of sulphur emissions, sewage, oil contaminated water, rubbish, etc.

Add in the fact that many people fly to their starting destination, and cruises are an environmental disaster zone.

Comments

[watervole]

Discounting the gas and electricity is fair, though won't make a big difference. The biggest cost is simply hauling all that mass around the globe. (and ship with all those internal cabins will probably have a very high demand for air conditioning that you won't use at home)

It's the distances involves that make it so bad.

Your example of the railway will still be bad, even though not as bad as your friends calculated. It's going all the way across Canada - that's an enormous distance.

The cost of aviation looks great per mile. but there are an awful lot of miles.

Our perception of the world has shrunk. In the days when it took a sailing ship six to fourteen weeks to go from England to America, we had a much better sense of just how far it was. Now we can do it in less than a day and it's just a short hop.