In 2019, a study commissioned by Transport and Environment — a European clean transport campaign organization — analyzed sulfur dioxide emissions from cruise ships operating in European waters and found that the cruise industry as a whole produced more sulfur oxide pollution in European seas than all of Europe’s 260 million cars combined, because cruise ships burn heavy fuel oil — also called bunker fuel — a viscous, tar-like petroleum byproduct so high in sulfur content and so toxic in its combustion emissions that its use is prohibited in most land-based applications in developed nations and regulated by international maritime standards that set limits significantly higher than those applied to any land-based emission source, meaning that the fuel burned by a single large cruise ship produces sulfur dioxide emissions equivalent to approximately 3.6 million cars, particulate matter at concentrations that exceed WHO air quality guidelines in port cities where ships idle for hours, and nitrogen oxides that contribute to coastal acid deposition affecting the marine ecosystems the cruise industry’s marketing depends on for its commercial appeal.
Carnival Corporation — the world’s largest cruise operator, whose brands include Carnival, Princess, Holland America, Costa, and Cunard — was fined $20 million in 2016 after pleading guilty to deliberate illegal dumping of oily waste and plastic into the ocean and falsifying records to conceal it, placed on probation with court-appointed environmental compliance officers aboard its ships, and in 2019 found to have violated that probation through eight categories of violation including dumping food waste in protected Bahamian waters, discharging plastic mixed with food waste into the ocean, and failing to properly maintain its pollution prevention equipment — and was fined an additional $20 million, the largest criminal penalty ever imposed for deliberate vessel pollution.
The same company generated approximately $20 billion in annual revenue in the years surrounding those violations. The total fines represented approximately 0.2% of a single year’s revenue. The ships kept sailing. The brochures kept describing the pristine ocean.
The cruise ship sells you the ocean it is poisoning. The fuel it burns is banned on land because it is too toxic. The fine it paid for dumping illegally was smaller than the cost of not dumping illegally. That calculation has been made. It has been found acceptable. The dolphins swimming through the discharge wake did not find it acceptable. But the dolphins are not in the decision meeting. They are in the discharge.
