California and Alaska Charting a New Course for the Cruise Industry

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Gershon Cohen, Ph.D.
CSAW Project Director
Earth Island Institute

The cruise industry is finally steaming into charted waters from a regulatory perspective: CSAW and the ad-hoc group Responsible Cruising in Alaska drafted and passed a statewide citizens’ initiative in Alaska in 2006, which recently resulted in Alaska issuing the nation’s first discharge permit for cruise ships. Alaska now requires independent marine engineers (Ocean Rangers) on every vessel.

CSAW helped California adopt a zero-discharge rule in 2005, and a new bill introduced by Senator Joe Simitian and sponsored by CSAW (Senate Bill 1582) to place Ocean Rangers on cruise ships in California waters is moving through the State Senate. The California Ocean Rangers will also be public safety officers, to address the high rate of rapes, assaults, robberies, and disappearances on cruise ships. Similar legislation will soon be introduced in Congress.

The industry's public-relations flacks have of course been busy complaining Alaska’s permit requirements are oppressive and Ocean Rangers are unnecessary. The fact is every major cruise line has been convicted on felony charges for dumping wastes into public waters, and the crime rates on the ships are going overboard. Ocean Rangers will assist victims, gather evidence, and most importantly, deter crimes against people and the environment before they are committed. Tighter standards and more oversight are desperately needed.

The industry’s main beef with Alaska’s new permit is they will not be allowed to have “mixing zones,” areas where Alaska's water quality standards for toxicity, copper, zinc, nickel and ammonia won't apply. The industry is correct that without a mixing zone they are meeting a higher level of performance than most other polluters. Why should cruise ships clear a higher bar? They move and their mixing zones would move with them. Fish won't know they are getting contaminated in a mixing zone, and neither will fishermen. Furthermore, since the mixing zones of many ships would overlap, we wouldn't be able to monitor an individual discharger or area and determine when there is an impact. Mixing zone supporters claim there's enough assimilative capacity in the ocean to absorb their waste. Didn't we hear the same argument about our atmosphere's ability to absorb carbon dioxide?

The biggest problem with authorizing mixing zones is they remove any incentive for improving treatment technologies. If you can pollute for free you won't pay someone to build a better treatment system. The technology that would bring the cruise ships into compliance with current law would also become available to other dischargers, making waters cleaner all over the nation.