6 ms·

If we really meant it with climate policies, cruise ships and private jets would be banned immediately.

bwb 7y ago
We could also just make them a lot cleaner too :), it doesn't have to be a binary choice.
tomp 7y ago
I oppose banning anything... We just need to take the externalities (costs incured on the environment/population/other stake holders that are currently not included) into account and tax products/services accordingly. That way, you both (1) reduce the environmental impact, and (2) encourage development of newer, cleaner technologies.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Taxing them out of existence isn’t any different from banning them.
  - LaughingMan11 7y ago
    The general idea is that if you tax or price in the cost of doing the bad thing, these companies will try to optimize those costs down for the good of their shareholders, which would be a win-win. In the real world, you'll probably have a lot of cover up of this sort of thing, as the companies would find it cheaper just to not report they dumped pollution into the environment than to report it and have to pay for it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-...
  - epistasis 7y ago
    Taxing them to recoup carbon emissions would only reduce air travel, not eliminate all carriers. Say that it gets 5x or 10x more expensive, there would still be flights, just far less common. And maybe then something like biokerosene becomes cost effective, driving down costs more.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      Just want to throw it out there that your typical passenger airline operates at a 2.5% margin. Freight airlines are even less. That multiplayer is going directly to consumers. Nobody wants a world where we're paying $50 to ship a package, $1000 for a short flight, or their grocery bill to double since transportation is most of the cost.
      - mikeash 7y ago
        A proper carbon tax would capture the externalities. If that results in a cost of $50 to ship a package, that just means we’re paying $50 now, but most of that cost is borne by other people who get no say.
      - ergothus 7y ago
        A world where we have cheap shipping/flights but pay the same excessive total or more elsewhere to deal with the externalities isnt better, it is just shifting the misery around.
        Spivak 7y ago
        I don't disagree at all but shifting the costs of these externalities to individuals who really have no power doesn't really accomplish anything and is basically the definition of regressive. Telling someone who was living paycheck to paycheck before the change that their cost of living doubled and they should think of the environment is insane. So yes. Please shift the misery.
        epistasis 7y ago
        We are already shifting the misery to people have no control of it, that's what an externality is. First, most carbon taxes I have seen proposed are revenue neutral, and give the money back to those with lower incomes or provide lower carbon options to people like transit. Though vehicle access and use has climbed in recent years in places like Southern California, it's not as though a carbon tax is an unavoidable expense, people always have other options. A doubling of the cost of living is just so far outside of the plausible realm as to be ridiculous. A $3/gallon gas tax is way higher than any carbon tax I've seen proposed, but even if the economy didn't adapt to it and optimize a ton, that's not enough for a doubling of the cost of living. The key is that we must change behavior, and change our carbon use. It's not enough to say "if we do this bad it will hurt this small group of people," we must say that and show how to mitigate that harm or show that it's greater harm than our current course of action. The status quo is not justified as a default option.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    I don't disagree that there are some people who want to tax things out of existence but the purpose of taxes like this should be to in good-faith accurately measure the real cost of these externalities and price them accordingly. The problem we're facing is that there's no clear consensus on what that cost is.
- lifty 7y ago
  I prefer this approach as well. We shouldn’t ban anything but instead tax pollution and other externalities accordingly (high taxation level). This way solution can appear slowly, without outright banning whole industries. The principle being, you can do whatever as long as you don’t affect others.
- LaughingMan11 7y ago
  You'll have to deal with companies that spent considerable effort exploiting those externalities and then covering it up: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-... Coincidentally the same company...
  - tomp 7y ago
    GDPR-style penalties (i.e. 10% of global revenue) + jail time for executives. The problem will solve itself...
- moonbug 7y ago
  >I oppose banning anything Why?
  - tomp 7y ago
    It's literally oppression. I want to make decisions on my own, not someone else making them for me. The only things that are justifiably banned are those that negatively impact others without their consensus (and even there, I disagree with most governments - e.g. I think euthanasia should be legal and capital punishment not). Obviously you could make the same argument about the environment ("you're killing nature without its consent") but as long as we (the human civilisation) cannot live in a zero-impact manner, it shouldn't be nobody else's choice on how I polute the environment (i.e. as long as you drive a car, I can fly in a private jet, provided that environmental costs are accounted for proportionally)
    - mikeash 7y ago
      Why isn’t it “oppression” to poison the air that someone needs to breathe?
      - tomp 7y ago
        It is, certainly, but unless you want the human civilisation revert back to stone age, there's no way around it. We can only minimize the impact right now (e.g. with more taxation that's better aligned with actual externalities), and improve technology to reach that goal in the future (again, taxation/subsidies but in the limit they're essentially the same).
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Which is tricky with shipping (cruises or otherwise), because they will often pick a flag of convenience (i.e. somewhere without the taxes). You could add higher port fees, but how is that encouraging better technology? If anything it will just encourage ships/cruise lines to dock nearby and ship goods/people over land/air. Taxes are fine if a business cannot float between countries. In this case the business can literally float between countries, and they'll avoid the taxes.
  - tomp 7y ago
    > Taxes are fine if a business cannot float between countries No, you just need to drop the idea of free trade. Big economies (in particular, the US and EU) are big enough to enforce their standards globally. Serving EU customers? Comply with GDPR. Want to do business in USD? Comply with US banking regulations. Same could be done for shipping (and, I wish, tax avoidance & other environmental standards).
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > We just need to take the externalities [...] and tax [...] accordingly. That would be nice if geopolitics and economics worked like clockwork and were thus amenable to simple "rule-changes", but the fact is there are populations for whom tax-evasion is an art-form. Not everything can be made to "play-nice" with free-markets.
Ennis 7y ago
There is no reason to ban them. Charge the emissions to influence behaviour and investments. We don't know what innovations can come out of this if enough pressure is applied.
mooseburger 7y ago
Yeah, it's something that gives me pause about political action against global warming: how many people who want such political action are willing to never ride a plane or a cruise ship ever again? I think few have processed that a real effort to address this problem would involve real personal sacrifice, it can't be conveniently resolved just by building a ton of solar panels and windmills.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  Cruise ships contribute almost nothing to global warming. There may be other reasons to ban them, but global warming isn't one of them.
Symmetry 7y ago
The pollution that the article is talking about, sulfur dioxide, isn't a component of climate change and actually tends to cool the Earth down. The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cruise ships is far lower than that emitted by cars and in terms of carbon emissions per kilometer traveled per passenger cruise ships are pretty clean compared to other forms of transportation.
cm2012 7y ago
Cruise ships are almost certainly cleaner than commercial air travel as a whole. It takes a lot less energy to move a big ship with 4000 people sideways on water at 50 MPH than to lift people into the sky in 20 groups of 200 at 600 MPH. And these are close to replacement goods (less cruises = more airplanes). The main stat on this article is dumb because cars don't really emit sulphur oxide, so obviously something that emits some will be a huge multiplier. EDIT: This is almost certainly wrong, as other comments have pointed out to me. Not deleting it for posterity's sake.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  > It takes a lot less energy to move a big ship with 4000 people sideways on water at 50 MPH than to lift people into the sky in 20 groups of 200 at 600 MPH. In terms of CO2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/739287/Flying-three-times-greener-than-cruising.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/739287/Flying-three-times...
  - cm2012 7y ago
    That is genuinely surprising and nasty. To be that much less efficient given the constraints, cruise ships must be using terrifyingly dirty fuel.
    - MagnumOpus 7y ago
      As a side-note, please be careful to distinguish between local pollution from dirty fuel (SOx emissions, particulates), and global pollution from _carbon emissions_. They are two wildly different things, and often there is a big trade-off where cutting one raises the other (c.f. the VW scandal). Cruise ships, as it happens, are horrible on both measures.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      They are very large and heavy (much more weight per passenger), there’s additional drag and resistance, not to mention time, which I think accounts for some of the energy waste. In short, that spending a few hours on a thin metal aerodynamic cigar is more energy effective than a week spent on a bulky floating city doesn’t surprise me.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mikeash 7y ago
The contribution of cruise ships to climate change is negligible.
cookingrobot 7y ago
Is the sulphur pollution they're talking about here (SOx) a climate change contributor, or is this concern about other health risks?
ineedasername 7y ago
In terms of CO2, aviation accounts for roughly 2% of global man-made emissions. This is not nothing, but eliminating it would not be the same as eliminating all of its emissions. Shipping and travel done via aviation would simply shift to land and water based options, which would in turn increase their emissions. It would also have quit an impact on the infrastructure of modern civilization and economy. Banned overnight would result in mass disruption and probably deaths due to inability to shift material resources quickly. Alternative would take years to upgrade the infrastructure and logistics needed to truly replace aviation. I'm not saying we shouldn't consider and focus on better efficiency and other technology in the aviation sector, but there are lower hanging fruits. It would be much more viable in the short term to fractionally decrease, say, a fraction of industrial emissions equivalent to all of aviation emissions. Or improve carbon sequestration technology.

bwb 7y ago

We could also just make them a lot cleaner too :), it doesn't have to be a binary choice.

tomp 7y ago

I oppose banning anything... We just need to take the externalities (costs incured on the environment/population/other stake holders that are currently not included) into account and tax products/services accordingly. That way, you both (1) reduce the environmental impact, and (2) encourage development of newer, cleaner technologies.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Taxing them out of existence isn’t any different from banning them.
- LaughingMan11 7y ago
  The general idea is that if you tax or price in the cost of doing the bad thing, these companies will try to optimize those costs down for the good of their shareholders, which would be a win-win. In the real world, you'll probably have a lot of cover up of this sort of thing, as the companies would find it cheaper just to not report they dumped pollution into the environment than to report it and have to pay for it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-...
- epistasis 7y ago
  Taxing them to recoup carbon emissions would only reduce air travel, not eliminate all carriers. Say that it gets 5x or 10x more expensive, there would still be flights, just far less common. And maybe then something like biokerosene becomes cost effective, driving down costs more.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Just want to throw it out there that your typical passenger airline operates at a 2.5% margin. Freight airlines are even less. That multiplayer is going directly to consumers. Nobody wants a world where we're paying $50 to ship a package, $1000 for a short flight, or their grocery bill to double since transportation is most of the cost.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      A proper carbon tax would capture the externalities. If that results in a cost of $50 to ship a package, that just means we’re paying $50 now, but most of that cost is borne by other people who get no say.
    - ergothus 7y ago
      A world where we have cheap shipping/flights but pay the same excessive total or more elsewhere to deal with the externalities isnt better, it is just shifting the misery around.
      - Spivak 7y ago
        I don't disagree at all but shifting the costs of these externalities to individuals who really have no power doesn't really accomplish anything and is basically the definition of regressive. Telling someone who was living paycheck to paycheck before the change that their cost of living doubled and they should think of the environment is insane. So yes. Please shift the misery.
        epistasis 7y ago
        We are already shifting the misery to people have no control of it, that's what an externality is. First, most carbon taxes I have seen proposed are revenue neutral, and give the money back to those with lower incomes or provide lower carbon options to people like transit. Though vehicle access and use has climbed in recent years in places like Southern California, it's not as though a carbon tax is an unavoidable expense, people always have other options. A doubling of the cost of living is just so far outside of the plausible realm as to be ridiculous. A $3/gallon gas tax is way higher than any carbon tax I've seen proposed, but even if the economy didn't adapt to it and optimize a ton, that's not enough for a doubling of the cost of living. The key is that we must change behavior, and change our carbon use. It's not enough to say "if we do this bad it will hurt this small group of people," we must say that and show how to mitigate that harm or show that it's greater harm than our current course of action. The status quo is not justified as a default option.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I don't disagree that there are some people who want to tax things out of existence but the purpose of taxes like this should be to in good-faith accurately measure the real cost of these externalities and price them accordingly. The problem we're facing is that there's no clear consensus on what that cost is.
lifty 7y ago
I prefer this approach as well. We shouldn’t ban anything but instead tax pollution and other externalities accordingly (high taxation level). This way solution can appear slowly, without outright banning whole industries. The principle being, you can do whatever as long as you don’t affect others.
LaughingMan11 7y ago
You'll have to deal with companies that spent considerable effort exploiting those externalities and then covering it up: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-... Coincidentally the same company...
- tomp 7y ago
  GDPR-style penalties (i.e. 10% of global revenue) + jail time for executives. The problem will solve itself...
moonbug 7y ago
>I oppose banning anything Why?
- tomp 7y ago
  It's literally oppression. I want to make decisions on my own, not someone else making them for me. The only things that are justifiably banned are those that negatively impact others without their consensus (and even there, I disagree with most governments - e.g. I think euthanasia should be legal and capital punishment not). Obviously you could make the same argument about the environment ("you're killing nature without its consent") but as long as we (the human civilisation) cannot live in a zero-impact manner, it shouldn't be nobody else's choice on how I polute the environment (i.e. as long as you drive a car, I can fly in a private jet, provided that environmental costs are accounted for proportionally)
  - mikeash 7y ago
    Why isn’t it “oppression” to poison the air that someone needs to breathe?
    - tomp 7y ago
      It is, certainly, but unless you want the human civilisation revert back to stone age, there's no way around it. We can only minimize the impact right now (e.g. with more taxation that's better aligned with actual externalities), and improve technology to reach that goal in the future (again, taxation/subsidies but in the limit they're essentially the same).
Someone1234 7y ago
Which is tricky with shipping (cruises or otherwise), because they will often pick a flag of convenience (i.e. somewhere without the taxes). You could add higher port fees, but how is that encouraging better technology? If anything it will just encourage ships/cruise lines to dock nearby and ship goods/people over land/air. Taxes are fine if a business cannot float between countries. In this case the business can literally float between countries, and they'll avoid the taxes.
- tomp 7y ago
  > Taxes are fine if a business cannot float between countries No, you just need to drop the idea of free trade. Big economies (in particular, the US and EU) are big enough to enforce their standards globally. Serving EU customers? Comply with GDPR. Want to do business in USD? Comply with US banking regulations. Same could be done for shipping (and, I wish, tax avoidance & other environmental standards).
crispyambulance 7y ago
> We just need to take the externalities [...] and tax [...] accordingly. That would be nice if geopolitics and economics worked like clockwork and were thus amenable to simple "rule-changes", but the fact is there are populations for whom tax-evasion is an art-form. Not everything can be made to "play-nice" with free-markets.

Ennis 7y ago

There is no reason to ban them. Charge the emissions to influence behaviour and investments. We don't know what innovations can come out of this if enough pressure is applied.

mooseburger 7y ago

Yeah, it's something that gives me pause about political action against global warming: how many people who want such political action are willing to never ride a plane or a cruise ship ever again? I think few have processed that a real effort to address this problem would involve real personal sacrifice, it can't be conveniently resolved just by building a ton of solar panels and windmills.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
Cruise ships contribute almost nothing to global warming. There may be other reasons to ban them, but global warming isn't one of them.

Symmetry 7y ago

The pollution that the article is talking about, sulfur dioxide, isn't a component of climate change and actually tends to cool the Earth down. The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cruise ships is far lower than that emitted by cars and in terms of carbon emissions per kilometer traveled per passenger cruise ships are pretty clean compared to other forms of transportation.

cm2012 7y ago

Cruise ships are almost certainly cleaner than commercial air travel as a whole. It takes a lot less energy to move a big ship with 4000 people sideways on water at 50 MPH than to lift people into the sky in 20 groups of 200 at 600 MPH. And these are close to replacement goods (less cruises = more airplanes). The main stat on this article is dumb because cars don't really emit sulphur oxide, so obviously something that emits some will be a huge multiplier. EDIT: This is almost certainly wrong, as other comments have pointed out to me. Not deleting it for posterity's sake.

boomlinde 7y ago
> It takes a lot less energy to move a big ship with 4000 people sideways on water at 50 MPH than to lift people into the sky in 20 groups of 200 at 600 MPH. In terms of CO2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/739287/Flying-three-times-greener-than-cruising.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/739287/Flying-three-times...
- cm2012 7y ago
  That is genuinely surprising and nasty. To be that much less efficient given the constraints, cruise ships must be using terrifyingly dirty fuel.
  - MagnumOpus 7y ago
    As a side-note, please be careful to distinguish between local pollution from dirty fuel (SOx emissions, particulates), and global pollution from _carbon emissions_. They are two wildly different things, and often there is a big trade-off where cutting one raises the other (c.f. the VW scandal). Cruise ships, as it happens, are horrible on both measures.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    They are very large and heavy (much more weight per passenger), there’s additional drag and resistance, not to mention time, which I think accounts for some of the energy waste. In short, that spending a few hours on a thin metal aerodynamic cigar is more energy effective than a week spent on a bulky floating city doesn’t surprise me.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mikeash 7y ago

The contribution of cruise ships to climate change is negligible.

cookingrobot 7y ago

Is the sulphur pollution they're talking about here (SOx) a climate change contributor, or is this concern about other health risks?

ineedasername 7y ago

In terms of CO2, aviation accounts for roughly 2% of global man-made emissions. This is not nothing, but eliminating it would not be the same as eliminating all of its emissions. Shipping and travel done via aviation would simply shift to land and water based options, which would in turn increase their emissions. It would also have quit an impact on the infrastructure of modern civilization and economy. Banned overnight would result in mass disruption and probably deaths due to inability to shift material resources quickly. Alternative would take years to upgrade the infrastructure and logistics needed to truly replace aviation. I'm not saying we shouldn't consider and focus on better efficiency and other technology in the aviation sector, but there are lower hanging fruits. It would be much more viable in the short term to fractionally decrease, say, a fraction of industrial emissions equivalent to all of aviation emissions. Or improve carbon sequestration technology.