Cruise Ships - Unregulated Trouble on the High Seas?
14/01/15 18:01 Filed in: Cruise Ships | Environment
A journalists opinion of the Cruise Ship industry - If you have any comments please send us an email.
Cruise Ships Are Unregulated Trouble on the High Seas
by Elizabeth Becker, a former New York Times correspondent, the author of “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism.”
UPDATED JANUARY 5, 2015, 10:43 PM
Cruise ships have become the symbol of all that’s gone haywire in the tourism industry.
The largest of these floating hotels are the size of horizontal skyscrapers and carry as many as 6,000 passengers. They cross the seas polluting the water and air and overwhelming their ports of call. Their accidents make headlines: from the deadly capsizing of a ship off the coast of Italy to a child drowning because no lifeguard was on duty.
A lack of modern regulations is the core problem and the chief reason why cruises are so popular. Less regulation translates into cheaper tickets ($389 for seven days in the Bahamas!) Cruises make their big profits once passengers are onboard from alcohol sales, gambling and those on-shore excursions. Plus cruises are easy – one bed, no decisions.
Congress has allowed these behemoths to operate like a Vegas resort without any of the regulations that apply in the United States. Thanks to Congress, cruises are exempt from: labor laws (waiters are paid $50 a month plus tips and no benefits); most sewage and water regulations under the Clean Water Act; and standards of the Clean Air Act in international waters.
Carnival and Royal Caribbean are headquartered in Miami and, with their subsidiaries, represent nearly two-thirds of the global cruise business. Yet they largely operate outside of most American regulatory laws – and pay almost no corporate taxes. They do this by flagging and registering their ships in other nations (Liberia, Panama and the Bahamas) and winning the right from Congress to be treated in most instances like a commercial vessel and not a hotel.
Since Congress hasn’t budged on these issues – cruise lines are generous donors – local and regional authorities have stepped into the breach.
Citizens of cities as different as Venice, Italy, and Charleston, S.C., are trying to block the biggest ships from docking. Vancouver banned cruise ship air pollution during the Olympic Winter Games. Belize has restricted cruise passengers to one beach area – a practice known in the industry as a sacrifice zone – to protect other ares from being trashed.
California waters were “a sewage pond for big ships" before federal officials allowed the state to ban all sewage discharges from large ships along its coast, said Matthew Rodriquez, the state’s secretary for environmental protection. All large cruise ships using heavy fuel oil have been banned from Antarctica because its fragile environment can’t afford a single accident.
Consumers can do their part by finding a cruise that respects the environment from online resources like "The Cruise Report Card" by Friends of the Earth, and "Eco-Friendly Cruises" by Nerd Wallet.
Correction: An earlier version said that every day the average cruise ship dumps 21,000 gallons of human waste, one ton of solid waste garbage, 170,000 gallons of wastewater and 8,500 plastic bottles in the ocean, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But those are figures for the amount of waste generated, not discharged, by those ships. Also, an earlier version said all cruise ships had been banned from Antarctica.
by Elizabeth Becker, a former New York Times correspondent, the author of “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism.”
UPDATED JANUARY 5, 2015, 10:43 PM
Cruise ships have become the symbol of all that’s gone haywire in the tourism industry.
The largest of these floating hotels are the size of horizontal skyscrapers and carry as many as 6,000 passengers. They cross the seas polluting the water and air and overwhelming their ports of call. Their accidents make headlines: from the deadly capsizing of a ship off the coast of Italy to a child drowning because no lifeguard was on duty.
A lack of modern regulations is the core problem and the chief reason why cruises are so popular. Less regulation translates into cheaper tickets ($389 for seven days in the Bahamas!) Cruises make their big profits once passengers are onboard from alcohol sales, gambling and those on-shore excursions. Plus cruises are easy – one bed, no decisions.
Congress has allowed these behemoths to operate like a Vegas resort without any of the regulations that apply in the United States. Thanks to Congress, cruises are exempt from: labor laws (waiters are paid $50 a month plus tips and no benefits); most sewage and water regulations under the Clean Water Act; and standards of the Clean Air Act in international waters.
Carnival and Royal Caribbean are headquartered in Miami and, with their subsidiaries, represent nearly two-thirds of the global cruise business. Yet they largely operate outside of most American regulatory laws – and pay almost no corporate taxes. They do this by flagging and registering their ships in other nations (Liberia, Panama and the Bahamas) and winning the right from Congress to be treated in most instances like a commercial vessel and not a hotel.
Since Congress hasn’t budged on these issues – cruise lines are generous donors – local and regional authorities have stepped into the breach.
Citizens of cities as different as Venice, Italy, and Charleston, S.C., are trying to block the biggest ships from docking. Vancouver banned cruise ship air pollution during the Olympic Winter Games. Belize has restricted cruise passengers to one beach area – a practice known in the industry as a sacrifice zone – to protect other ares from being trashed.
California waters were “a sewage pond for big ships" before federal officials allowed the state to ban all sewage discharges from large ships along its coast, said Matthew Rodriquez, the state’s secretary for environmental protection. All large cruise ships using heavy fuel oil have been banned from Antarctica because its fragile environment can’t afford a single accident.
Consumers can do their part by finding a cruise that respects the environment from online resources like "The Cruise Report Card" by Friends of the Earth, and "Eco-Friendly Cruises" by Nerd Wallet.
Correction: An earlier version said that every day the average cruise ship dumps 21,000 gallons of human waste, one ton of solid waste garbage, 170,000 gallons of wastewater and 8,500 plastic bottles in the ocean, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But those are figures for the amount of waste generated, not discharged, by those ships. Also, an earlier version said all cruise ships had been banned from Antarctica.