Help us settle an argument..

[anonymous-user]

So the wife and I were talking earlier about pollution and whether air or sea travel was worse for the environment when it comes to tourism-related transport.

My gut said airlines pollute our skies far more than ships pollute our seas, but I wondered if there’s any data or evidence to support either point of view?

Your thoughts please PH?

[TwigtheWonderkid]

EFH189 said:

So the wife and I were talking earlier about pollution and whether air or sea travel was worse for the environment when it comes to tourism-related transport.

My gut said airlines pollute our skies far more than ships pollute our seas, but I wondered if there’s any data or evidence to support either point of view?

Your thoughts please PH?

No idea, but my gut feeling is that a cruise, with the fuel used, the food consumed, getting the food on to the ship, etc, will have a far bigger carbon footprint than a flight. Not to mention the materials used to making a cruise liner compared to a plane.

[Doofus]

I read somewhere that cross channel ferries (and the like) are the worst polluters per passenger, but obviously airlines used to carry significantly more passengers.

[Teddy Lop]

Depends on what kinds of pollutants you're looking for.

Ships tend to use heavy oil, which is the crap left over after the bits you want have been removed from crude, sod all use for anything else and pretty nasty but because there's no-one to police emissions in the ocean its ok. Although you could argue making use of unwanted product is pretty efficient...

Aircraft use a far higher grade of fuel but blast their emissions out high in the atmosphere where its purported to be far more harmfull.

[mmm-five]

What answer are you looking for?

• Emissions per passenger per km
• Total emissions from the industry per year
• Emissions per passenger per year
• Carbon emissions only
• Carbon emissions plus bilge & passenger waste
• etc.

Most can be found via google.

e.g. [but missing from that diagram above is sea travel - which seems to be 251g for a passenger on a cruise, or 18g for a foot passenger on a ferry]

[anonymous-user]

Thanks, having had a quick look on Google it would appear the consensus is that cruises emit three times more CO2 per mile than planes.

[Teddy Lop]

EFH189 said:

Thanks, having had a quick look on Google it would appear the consensus is that cruises emit three times more CO2 per mile than planes.

what are you looking to prove/resolve?

I guess they all have too be contextualized, a cruise is a floating co2 producing factory for the whole week wheras a flight is a few hours - but on what grounds do you compare the two - if you fly to Disneyworld, stay in a resort and and hire a nimitz class SUV etc etc then what?

[anonymous-user]

I guess we didn’t really discuss in that much detail, it was more a generalised conversation about how much pollutant each method left, either in the air or in the sea and which was ultimately more damaging to the environment.

We aren’t scientists, as you will have no doubt gathered

[mike74]

Teddy Lop said:

Depends on what kinds of pollutants you're looking for.

Ships tend to use heavy oil, which is the crap left over after the bits you want have been removed from crude, sod all use for anything else and pretty nasty but because there's no-one to police emissions in the ocean its ok. Although you could argue making use of unwanted product is pretty efficient...

I've never quite understood the appeal of shelling out thousands of pounds to spend a couple of weeks sat under an industrial smokestack belching out all manner of noxious ste.

[anonymous-user]

Air is less dense than water. And air at altitude is practically not even there!

Slow speed ships can be very efficient, but people who travel tend to want to get somewhere, so a sailing ship, or very slow speed heat engine driven ship is not really relevant in our world today

[C70GT]

The correct answer is: your wife is correct.

[2fast748]

On one of them Richard Hammond type shows on Discovery/NatGeo/whatever it was stated that a modern container ship will do the equivalent of 1000mpg/per tonne carried which is quite impressive.

[Hugo a Gogo]

so a car might get 40mpg, for example? so with four people that's 160mpg/passenger

fully loaded cruise ship gets about 14 mpg/passenger

fully loaded 747 gets 91 mpg/passenger

that might be us gallons, but you get the general picture

plus ships are just dirtier, sulphur emissions, toilets dumping at sea etc, piss poor employee rights, tax avoidance etc

[anonymous-user]

C70GT said:

The correct answer is: your wife is correct.

She often tells me this

[nammynake]

Is CO2 classed as a pollutant now?

[Dg504]

Depends what you choose but NOx emissions aren’t your friend here, this has been around in various figures for a while now:

https://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ship...

[Dg504]

Also isn’t cargo shipping the most efficient in terms of CO2 per tonne moved per km?

[GroundZero]

nammynake said:

Is CO2 classed as a pollutant now?

The reason = taxation.
I'm a little surprised nobody has created an argument to tax oxygen we breath in as well as the CO2 we breath out.

[Krikkit]

mike74 said:

I've never quite understood the appeal of shelling out thousands of pounds to spend a couple of weeks sat under an industrial smokestack belching out all manner of noxious ste.

Depends which ones you use, some of the newer cruise ships aren't using heavy oil, and some implement very complex exhaust filtration systems to reduce the crap being spewed.

I've been on 2, and I can see the appeal as it's a convenient, stress-free way to see snippets of different countries in a region. 24h accessible food, endless bars etc also appeal.

Of the two I've been on, the older one you could see the vague yellow haze of exhaust following us (which was depressing), although it was much cleaner than some of the other commercial tubs we saw along the way. The newer one you couldn't see any exhaust plume at all.

[Condi]

Ship engines are the most efficient engines in the world, and the fuels used now have to be low sulpher.

If you had to move 1 tonne of freight from China to the UK a ship would be many many times more efficient than an aircraft.