Cleaner Oceans or Cheaper Cruises? The Decision Looms

The cruise industry may, for one small moment in its long history of befouling our planet top to bottom, finally be facing some modicum of reckoning, and praise be to the powers that be for this one. Any small strike against cruise ships is, after all, surely a win for surfing’s interests, particularly in cleaner waters and lesser crowds.

In April 2025, the United Nations announced a lofty green-energy plan through its high-seas regulatory body, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), in April 2025, but a U.S.-led opposition is upholding final approval, which has been postponed until October.

Biting their nails as they anxiously await the decision cruise-ship companies are “spending six-figure sums on consultants to read the tea leaves” of the IMO’s proposed Net-Zero Framework, per the Wall Street Journal. The proposed plan would implement a new set of international regulations “aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from ships—including all ocean-going ships over 5,000 gross tonnage—in line with IMO’s 2023 GHG Strategy, with two main parts, as follow:

1. “A global fuel standard that requires ships to gradually reduce how polluting its ship fuel can be (i.e. how much greenhouse gas is emitted for each unit of energy used, across a fuel's life cycle).

1. “A pricing mechanism with set prices on the GHG ships emit, to encourage the industry to lower emissions to comply with the global fuel standard.”

The primary fuels in question are marine diesel oil (MDO) in cruise ships and heavy fuel oil (HFO, aka bunker oil) in commercial vessels. Cruise ships are admittedly burning the less noxious stuff, but, getting down to brass tacks, it all adds up.

The choice is up to the U.S. and the other 15 opposing nations of the IMO’s 176 member-states this coming fall, and if no fresh agreement is signed, sealed, and hung up to dry by then, “the cruise industry will be in regulatory limbo—along with all commercial shipping,” portends the Journal.

Now, on the regretful front, this might result in yet even higher prices for consumer goods on the global market—something with which nearly one and all have become far too familiar. But there’s always a price to pay at one end or the other, is there not? Cleaner waters (and lands, and atmosphere) or fatter wallets?

Still want to cruise? Try a sail-powered small ship, a civilized mode of travel exponentially less likely to result in strange, suspect, and (almost positively) avoidable reckoning with mortality.