Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 12
Five years after the original court ruling, executives of Princess Cruises and Carnival
acknowledged their failure to maintain an independent investigative office into internal
affairs as had been required of them by the U.S. Department of Justice.
While the IAATO has found Princess Cruises to be compliant with its operational expectations,
the cruise line9s long track record of illegal practices and deception – including on the very
same vessel that now takes tourists to Antarctica – serves as a glaring reminder of how the
company prioritizes profit at severe environmental cost.
As a whole, an industry known for disobeying maritime laws is unlikely to change course
when it comes to the region-specific Polar Code. The code9s lack of firm enforcement
mechanisms means it is at best treated as a set of aspirational goals, and at worst, a series
of rules to ignore.
On the consumer front, cruise lines are a bit more savvy. Ships have grown conscious of the
bad optics associated with their environmental degradation, especially in the Antarctic.
Nevertheless, the trend holds that companies remain fixated on profits even as they tout
marketing ploys about sustainability.
Take, for example, Le Commandant Charcot, the newest member of French-operated
Ponant9s fleet of ships destined for Antarctic cruises. Launched in 2021, the 245-passenger
vessel is a hybrid-electric which runs partially on liquefied natural gas, a fuel source the
company claims is cleaner than traditional, carbon-intensive alternatives. Liquefied natural
gas contains the greenhouse gas methane. Although short-lived in the atmosphere
compared to carbon dioxide, methane has close to twenty-five times the heat-trapping
capacity to that of carbon. The International Council on Clean Transportation explains that
ship engines running on liquefied natural gas regularly leak unburned methane into the
atmosphere. Liquefied natural gas engines, which are supposedly cleaner, ultimately emit
more greenhouse gasses than their carbon-burning counterparts.
Hurtigruten, the Norwegian cruise line, has its own take on hybrid-electric vessels with the
Antarctica-bound sister ships MS Fridtjof Nansen and MS Roald Amundsen. Both are
equipped with technology claiming to reduce fuel consumption and carbon dioxide
emissions by 20%. For context, a 2021 study in the Marine Pollution Bulletin found that
passengers on the average seven-day Antarctic cruise produce the same amount of carbon
dioxide emissions as a European does across an entire year.
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