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ade to 46,000 visitors every year, the Antarctica authority decided these heavy fuel oils are
too great a risk to the fragile environment.
“Without regulations, we are going to have a disaster where a lot of lives are lost and
where oil spills out into the environment, and we see penguins being smothered and
poisoned by fuel oil in their rookeries,” said Trevor Hughes, New Zealand's head of Antarc-
tic policy in the Foreign Ministry.
The Antarctic Treaty members are reducing the number of ships and landings allowed,
imposing a ban on building tourist hotels and mandating strict rules on waste discharges
from ships. Ultimately, officials and scientists said they hoped to protect the few remaining
seas in the Antarctic where there was no pollution, no toxic “red tides,” no alien species,
no dead zones, no invasions of jellyfish, no control by humans.
But these uninhabited dramatic landscapes are catnip to tourists looking for a new ex-
perience. The demand to visit the poles has been so great that at the other end of the globe
Norway enacted a similar ban in 2007 for the east coast of the Svalbard Archipelago in the
Arctic Circle. The Norwegian environment minister, Helen Bjørnøy, said any ship using
heavy fuel oils was forbidden to visit the area; only ships using a very high quality of light
fuel oil are permitted to sail inside the nature reserves of eastern Svalbard.
“Tourism has become a big industry,” she said in the announcement. “Tourism brings
jobs and opportunities to people all over the world—including Norway, including the
Polar regions. But tourism—especially the large-scale global tourism—is also producing
growing pressures on resources, nature areas and ecosystems.”
• • •
Air pollution from the ships' high-sulfur-diesel-fueled engines is a separate problem. Arriv-
ing, departing and idling in ports, the ships' fuel exhaust releases carbon monoxide, sulfur
dioxide and nitrogen oxide that the Environmental Protection Agency considers human
carcinogens. As previously mentioned, one ship's engine idling at the dock released diesel
exhaust into the air equivalent to 12,000 cars each day. Part of the problem is the cheap,
heavy diesel fuel that ships burn rather than cleaner, more expensive fuel.
Sweeting of Royal Caribbean said comparing the air pollution from cruise ships to
either automobiles or airplanes was mixing apples and oranges because cruise ships are
not modes of transportation.
For the 2010 Winter Olympics, city officials of Vancouver, British Columbia, required
all cruise ships idling at their port to shut off their engines. Citing “cruise ship haze,” the
city said the ships had to use electricity when they docked, hooking up to the hydroelec-
tric power grid to operate as hotels during the games. The Canadians did not want their
games spoiled by cruise ship pollution, much like Beijing officials who ordered factories
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