“Do you feel, you know, some vibrations, under your bed?” This crewman on this ocean liner was clearly trying to seduce me.

“Of course, from the engine,” I sad.

I have been sleeping for the past thirteen days within a great machine. I can feel the mechanical throbbing all night long, and the intermittent hum through my pillow. Several hundred workers, mainly from Indonesia and the Philippines, dwell in the bowels of the ship—on the numberless decks below level one. Long, white corridors; no windows.

“Well, the problem is the boiler,” the crewman told me. Yes. It cannot be much fun to live for eleven months at a time next to a boiler. What does one say to that? This is what modern ocean travel has come to: driving across the ocean in what is essentially a giant luxury car.

When you think of the word “ship”, what images come to mind? It is an inspiring word, a positive word; it speaks of adventure, of passage, of potential. Of harnessing the elements for motion. Voyage, freedom. Or sometimes, slavery.  What are the realities of twenty-first century ships?

Three Realities

One. You are a guest entitled to fine cuisine, gracious service, exciting excursions, and all those miscellaneous things that fall into the category of “amenities.” Fresh fruit in your stateroom, towels folded into the shapes of sea creatures, etc. Perhaps you have worked all your life—as the supervisor of a shoe factory, as a high-ranking government official, as an international consultant—and now you are enjoying the rewards of your labor. Or perhaps you have just lost your husband of forty years, and your children are fully grown: you are now embarking on a brave voyage alone. You love to travel the world in style, and this cruise ship is the perfect venue for a relaxing sixty-five day tour of Asia. During the day you play bridge, take high tea in the dining room, lie encased in an “Alpha Capsule” in the spa. At night, you dance the cha-cha, the waltz, the tango. You dance like you haven’t danced in years. You sit at the bar with a martini and think back on your life.

Two. You used to work at a five-star hotel in Bali, but business has been dismal there after the terrorist attacks. Working on a ship offers wages several times the Indonesian norm, so you feel lucky to have the job—even though you have to work twelve-hour days, ten months a year, serving Westerners who have everything yet love to complain about nothing. Maybe you have seven brothers and sisters, and are paying for two of them to go through college. Or maybe you have used your salary to collaborate with the local government to build a school in your town, where twenty-five children now study and your sister teaches. Maybe you just save your money for the day when you can start your own business, and work for nobody but yourself.

When the ship calls in port, you use your brief break to walk around the area near the pier; you snap goofy photos with your friends to email to your family back home. On sea days, you wake up in the morning, prepare the continental breakfast buffet, pour tea and coffee, take a break, serve guests for lunch, take a break, eat rice and chicken in the crew mess, dress in formal clothes, work the dining room, go back to your cabin, fall asleep. Repeat. Each day you make it a point to go on deck and see the sun at least once.

Three. Crossing the ocean in the twenty-first century is much like driving across a vast desert at forty kilometers per hour. The wind whips up the waves; foam swirls in the air like sand. You wish for land so desperately that you begin to conjure island-mirages, much like those traversing the desert conjure oases. It is sublime. It is also an environmental tragedy.

The Numbers

The statistical reality is that shipping accounts for 4-5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (compared to about 2.5% from aviation). Most of this is from commercial traffic—the twenty million containers of goods being shipped around the globe. For example, the Copenhagen Post reported that the Danish shipping conglomerate A.P. Moeller-Maersk emits more greenhouse gases from its operations than the entire nation of Denmark (its emission rate is 40-50 million tons of CO2 per year).

But at least cargo ships aren’t burning oil to carrying around casinos and duty-free diamond boutiques. Passenger ships account for a small fraction of maritime emissions, but they are far worse than cargo ships emissions-wise, because they are designed for extravagance—not for getting from points A to B using the least amount of fuel.

We’ve given airplanes a bad reputation for being environmentally destructive, but the few statistics there are on cruise liners indicate they are much worse. How much worse? It depends on the ship. I asked the environmental officer on my ship on how much fuel the vessel burns, and he quoted a figure of 90 gallons per nautical mile on average, or 140 tons per day.

To make sense of that: George Monbiot is quoted in The Guardian as calculating that a ton of shipping fuel produces 3.1 tons of CO2 when burnt. If you calculate an 11-day Pacific crossing, for example, with 1300 passengers, that would be about 3,330 kg of carbon per person to get across the Pacific. That’s three times as much as the 1,100 kg from a transpacific flight. Clearly, this is a loose calculation by a blogger in the middle of the ocean. Someone with better resources could give you a more exact number, but this one shouldn’t be too far off. To put that number in perspective: according to UN statistics, the average American is responsible for about 20,300 kg of carbon a year, the average European or Japanese 9,000 kg, the average Emirati 37,700 kg, and the average Bangladeshi 250 kg.

What does awareness of global warming and expensive or scarce oil portend for the future of ships? Passenger ships are already in a tight spot with rising fuel prices: bunker fuel is already up to $700/ton, where it was around $100 not too many years ago. Ships basically burn really dirty, heavy fuel that is partially a byproduct of the refining process. While there is legislation in some areas (like the state of Alaska, for example) to force them to burn higher-grade fuels, those are of course more expensive. The first step, as the environmental officer told me, is to retrofit the ships to be more energy efficient.

This month, the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization (the UN organization that regulates shipping) will meet to discuss measures to control emissions. Previous meetings have bandied around the idea of developing a mandatory CO2 operational index, as well as voluntary standards and economic incentives for greenhouse gas reduction.

However, anything having to do with international waters is notoriously hard to regulate and enforce. For this reason, shipping may be one of the last sectors of our society to go green. It’s kind of an obscure sector, out of the public eye, and with no real governing body.

There are some options for greener ships: using alternative fuels, or harnessing windpower with kites, like the Beluga SkySails endeavor. There are also the occasional old-fashioned tall ships in use: transporting wine from France to Ireland via tall ship saves 4.9 ounces of carbon per bottle, according to one eco-savvy entrepreneur who is hoping to sway wine aficionados into buying sailboat-transported wine. Some people, like writer Dmitry Orlov, believe that a new age of sail is at hand. We could live on sailboats in the future, moving around between food-rich permaculture areas with via mankind’s greatest invention… yes, a future of windpowered, clean ships is compelling, whether they look old-fashioned or unlike anything we’ve dreamed of yet. But unless awareness about better shipping practices rises dramatically—enough to demand legislation, investment, and innovation towards greener ships—we might be stuck with these fuel-oil guzzling marine monsters for several decades to come.

What can the average person do about marine emissions? Buy local. Oh, and don’t be a moron like I was and try to take a passenger ship anywhere. Let me tell you how I ended up on this environmentally disastrous ship, so that perhaps one of you can learn from my mistake.

I’ve always been enticed by slow travel. It’s wonderful to create a space between where you have come from and where you are going, in order to reflect on the journey and prepare yourself to enter your destination. Back in 2003, I wanted to voyage around Europe, and found a ticket on an ocean liner for about $500—Ft. Lauderdale to Barcelona. This was a bizarre little nine-day voyage on a nearly-empty ship, granting me enough time to stare at the sea and recollect myself from the manic pace I had been living at. When I eventually got to the organic farm I was volunteering at in the UK, everyone complimented me for taking a ship instead of an airplane: awareness was just rising about how flying damages the climate. I got it in my head that anything was better than flying, and for some reason didn’t question my assumption over the years—perhaps because the media focuses more on flight than on ships, or perhaps because I’m just stupid sometimes. When I glimpsed the chance for a cheap ticket to Asia on a passenger ship, I grabbed it, without doing my green research. I knew I could travel by freighter but being trapped in close quarters with fifteen strange men for two weeks didn’t appeal to me. It kills me that a fifteen-minute Google search would have enlightened me to the simple facts about the impact of marine travel: that if I had bothered to look for a minute, I would have known that it is better to travel by plane, or not at all.

Seduction

There’s definitely a seduction to traveling by ship, even today. Listening to the doorman chime the xylophone for dinner is charming. Studying marine charts; receiving news of the ship’s coordinates each afternoon. Standing on deck, watching a rainbow break out upon the horizon. But like so many modern pleasures, it’s cursed with the knowledge of the price of it. It’s a seduction that’s impossible to derive any pleasure from.

At dinner, the steward opens the menu in front of me. I ask him how he is. He says he’s excellent, because he has to: ship’s rules. I know a bit about how extensive the rules are for the staff, since one of them got a written report sent to the captain for playing a game of chess with me. I order a chilled cream of cassis soup, a game hen with glazed parsnips, skipping the “Dialogue of Tartar and Avocado.” The woman next to me is talking about how she had to throw out two hundred pairs of shoes when she got her house remodeled. Someone gushes about a dinner they had in Geneva once. A creep from Florida asks if sixty-five is too old for me. The Indonesian waiter silently fills the glasses, ice clinking as the ship tilts; I know he is tired tonight. There are very few places in the world where one feels so strongly that they are bearing witness to the last vestiges of a dying culture.

Tags: carbon, climate change, cruising, ships, travel

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Posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 11:35 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.