The World’s Cruise Ships Can’t Sail. Now, What to Do With Them? - cruise ships.jpg

Miloch wrote in
:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/...ips-can-t-sail
-now-what-to-do-with-them/

(Bloomberg) -- Hundreds of people lined the banks of Glasgow’s River
Clyde a few weeks ago for the rare sight of a small, high-end cruise
ship sailing upriver—practically into the heart of the city. The
Azamara Journey thrilled socially distanced onlookers by blasting its
horn, typically a heralding of lively celebration. But this time
nobody was there to wave on the deck of the 700-passenger ship, aside
from the couple dozen members of its skeleton crew. This was no
celebratory arrival, after all: it was a vessel on life support, just
like every other ship dealing with the pandemic’s brutal wake.

Since mid-March, only a small handful of the world’s 400-or-so cruise
ships have been able to accept passengers—all on hyperlocal
itineraries. A few dozen are sailing the world with purpose,
repatriating crew members from every corner of the globe. The rest are
sitting idle in cruise ship purgatory, unable to sail commercially for
the foreseeable future. (In the U.S., the industry has agreed not to
resume business at least until Sept. 15.)

The problem for many cruise lines? Idling through the pandemic isn’t
just bad for the company’s bottom line, it’s a potential death warrant
for their costliest assets: the ships themselves. From mechanical
issues to hurricane risks to regulatory hurdles that can constitute
criminal offenses, it’s a quagmire that the industry has never faced
on this scale before.



On the other hand the world is enjoying
a breather from cruise ship pollution.





Report: Pollution from the Cruise Ship Industry is Still Massive

"Pollution from the cruise ship industry is still
massive, despite claims newer vessels are clean
and green," the report read. "No company comes
recommended in NABU’s 2017 cruise ship rankings,
which show just how little progress companies have
made towards cutting pollution."

Nabu claims that all of the vessels are powered by
heavy fuel oil, a sludgy tar-like fuel that produces
noxious fumes when burned that can harm not only
passengers of the cruise, but all those in the
vicinity of the ship, while greatly accelerating
climate change.

Estimates from Nabu put the average fuel usage of
each of these ships at 150 tons of fuel a day, which
releases as much particulate matter into the air as
about 1 million automobiles each day.

To make matters worse, many of the companies operating
the vessels have failed to install soot filters that
would at least marginally improve the environmental
impact of their massive fuel combustion.

Filters would help to capture some of the fine particulates
that are released when the diesel engines burn fuel, thereby
preventing them from escaping into the atmosphere. However,
of the 23 ships that the industry claimed would be equipped
with this technology, not a single one of them is operational.

The EU based non-profit Transport and Environment, which
advocates for cleaner means of transportation in Europe,
reports that pollution from the shipping industry causes
about 50,000 premature deaths and costs over €58 billion
per year.

Cruise ships also devastate oceans when they dump raw
sewage from their passengers. A 2014 study by the non-
governmental environmental agency Friends of the Earth
estimated that the entire industry dumps over 1 billion
gallons of sewage yearly.
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