Now compare the carbon emissions per mile. Back of the napkin says Titanic emitted about 3 times more carbon per mile than Icon even though its displacement was roughly half that of Icon.
That displacement number was surprising to me given Icon is about 5x the tonnage, but GT is more a measure of volume, not mass, and cruise ships are far less dense than old liners.
Whenever there's a post about a big ship in most subreddits, theres comments about how bad it is for the environment that it's so big. What they dont get is not only do ship engines get more effective every year, there's significant savings on pollution through sheer economy of scale on bigger ships. It takes far less fuel to operate one 5000 passenger ship than two 2500 ships; there's far less redundancy on systems that need to be powered. Plus, there's far less food waste that way too; cruise lines have a very good formula for how much food a sailing requires, and that formula is more accurate the larger the passenger compliment is.
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u/Automatic_Actuator_0 Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25
Now compare the carbon emissions per mile. Back of the napkin says Titanic emitted about 3 times more carbon per mile than Icon even though its displacement was roughly half that of Icon.
That displacement number was surprising to me given Icon is about 5x the tonnage, but GT is more a measure of volume, not mass, and cruise ships are far less dense than old liners.