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.

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    You quite literally cannot make them more efficient and less destructive because they will simply not go along with that.

    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.