I've been noticing this more and more, there's an insistence that pointed economic or environmental criticisms of some consumption habit, usually almost exclusively partaken by the upper middle class and wealthier people, must actually secretly be a purely cultural critique. I'm sure these guys work for Exxon or some shit, lmao.
Not to mention that cruise ships, like cargo ships, shop around for the countries with the laxest regulations on maritime vessels and register/license them there so they can effectively be a ship of [insert country] and exempt from any stricter standards to a large extent.
You quite literally cannot make them more efficient and less destructive because they will simply not go along with that. Before one could even think about making luxury cruises into something sustainable and humane you'd have to raze the entire industry to the ground in some way and rebuild it from the ground up to prevent the same sort of lawlessness from even being possible.
"Going on a big boat with lodgings in a nice place" isn't necessarily something completely unsalvageable, but to be salvaged it would need to be designed with a socialist ethos that values the workers operating it, ensures the safety and humane treatment of the environment and locals of the places it visits, and prioritizes the safety of vacationing workers over cramming in as many flashy faux-luxury treats coated in salmonella as physically possible. I don't think such objectives could be met with massive oceangoing vessels, personally, but smaller ones operating shorter trips, closer to shore, with fewer people might be something that could reasonably be achieved in a socialist society.
Yeah, flags of convenience is the term/insult from memory, Panama and Liberia are probably the most well known, but I think some landlocked countries are getting in on the easy money too.
So the US has that one act that says only US-flagged ships can deliver goods to Puerto Rico or something, right? The US could probably change the cruise industry overnight if they had some law that was like "ships with more than X paying passengers must be US-flagged to dock at US ports". Especially if it was a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada.
I feel like that would just result in the cruise industry designing ways to ferry passengers out to only load the main ships in international waters because it would still end up being .4% cheaper to go to such an expense than to have to comply with regulations and deal with liability.
Or you'd just have rogue US states like Florida flaunting the regulation or coming up with some bullshit special zone things to let cruise ships continue operating with impunity. If not them then Louisiana or Texas would do it to try to attract more money to themselves.
There'd need to be stronger and more widespread actions taken to bring the industry in line, like actively making it impossible for them to operate and getting as many of their owners and executives into custody as possible, physically impounding the ships, etc.
In the US you can, because you control the port system that they use to pick up passengers. In island nations, you can, because you control the port system that they use to drop off passengers.
Not a coincidence that Jamaican and Puerto Rican governments are utterly colonized by US industry. If places like this put their feet down - or if ports in Galveston and the Florida Keys refused to take on vessels that emitted in excess of X amounts of waste - the entire industry would be forced into a race to re-engineer themselves. The first ship capable of meeting new standards would suddenly have exclusive access to a wildly popular destination resort.
Naturally, that's never going to happen because of the way the industries are cartelized and the governments are entirely captured. But the cruise line industry is crazy vulnerable to a handful of municipal governments.
Grenada.png :sicko-wistful:
Havana :fidel-bat: