liz_barratt |
I have been out in the US for work for 6 months, and flew out here. I try to keep my carbon emissions as low as possible, however obviously moving to the states has had a big impact. I have recently been looking at my carbon emissions in both the sttes and what they were in the UK, and am also thinking of how to get home. I was thinking of cruising across the atlantic for a number of reasons, but a big issue is the carbon footprint of flying, however when looking into the emissions it appears that the emissions from a ferry journey is more per mile than long haul flights. I didn’t find any information on cruise ships, but would guess that it will be higher than ferrys as they are bigger and less densely packed. Does anybody know whether the impact of me flying back to the UK would be higher than sailing and what the best way (in green terms) of travelling from the US to the UK would be? (I put the details into google maps, it suggested swimming across the atlantic, I am not looking at anything that radical)
Liz
Cruising at least twice as bad as flying
john ackers
If you turn to page 184 of Monbiot's Heat (thanks Almuth), you will see that he quotes numbers from George Marshall at COIN for the QEII. Cunard say the ship burns 433 tonnes of fuel per day and it takes six days to travel from Southampton to New York. It carries 1790 passengers. If the ship is full, each passenger with a return ticket consumes 2.9 tonnes. A tonne of shipping fuel contains 0.85 tonnes of carbon, which produces 3.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Every passenger is responsible for 9.1 tonnes of emissions. Travelling to New York and back on the QEII, in other words uses 7.6 times as much carbon as making the same journey by plane.
This Guardian article Is cruising any greener than flying contains a quote that suggests that cruising might be only only twice as bad as flying. Plus this quote from Responsible Travel: On a typical one-week voyage a cruise ship generates more than 50 tonnes of garbage and a million tonnes of grey (waste) water, 210,000 gallons of sewage and 35,000 gallons of oil-contaminated water. Some of this is pumped into ocean and some treated.
The crusing business is going to have to completely overhaul itself. It has got used to having very cheap fuel and never had to buy carbon or pay any other fuel tax.