Airplane banner protesting Carnival’s climate pollution flies over Miami cruise terminal

International environmental organization Stand.earth attempted to meet Carnival Cruise Line’s new #ChooseFun blimp with an airplane banner protest on Thursday, September 20, in Miami — but the company avoided confrontation by keeping its blimp in Fort Lauderdale.

Miami, FL  — International environmental organization Stand.earth attempted to meet Carnival Cruise Line’s new #ChooseFun blimp with an airplane banner protest on Thursday, September 20, in Miami — but the company avoided confrontation by keeping its blimp in Fort Lauderdale.

Despite missing the blimp, the airplane banner circled downtown Miami, Miami Beach, and Dodge Island Cruise Ship Terminal for several hours — including during an event on one of Carnival’s ships featuring basketball player Shaquille O’Neall. The plane banner message, “Stop Carnival’s #DirtyShips”, is part of an international campaign asking parent company Carnival Corporation to end its use of one of the dirtiest fossil fuels in the world — heavy fuel oil.

View photos of the airplane banner protest.

Thursday’s scheduled stop in Miami was supposed to be part of Carnival Corporation’s massive marketing push for new winter homeports for several of its ships. The blimp is being deployed across the Southeastern U.S.

The plane banner protest follows vigils for the Arctic held in Seattle and Amsterdam last weekend, which also called on Carnival to end its use of heavy fuel oil.

“Carnival likes to tout its supposedly green credentials, but these claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. According to self-reported data, Carnival’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased by the year for over a decade. The vast majority of Carnival’s ships are powered with one of the dirtiest fossil fuels in the world, heavy fuel oil — a bottom-of-the barrel sludge that’s left over after other petroleum products are refined from crude oil. Carnival simply cannot claim to be an environmental steward while its ships are acting as glorified hazardous waste incinerators for the world’s oil refineries.” -Kendra Ulrich, Senior Shipping Campaigner, Stand.earth

Stand.earth is asking Carnival to immediately end its use of heavy fuel oil and switch to low sulfur distillate, starting with its ships traveling to the highly vulnerable Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. The organization is also asking the company to install specialized filters to address its enormous soot emissions, and invest in the development of long-term clean shipping technologies that do not require fossil fuels.

Carnival’s reliance on burning heavy fuel oil creates enormous amounts of black carbon (or soot), which causes huge problems for the Arctic ecosystem when it lands on sea ice and increases the rate of melt. Sea ice loss accelerates the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, and threatens species like polar bears and walrus that depend on it for survival.

A spill of this thick, molasses-like residual oil would be an ecological disaster that could not be cleaned up, especially in harsh polar environments. That is why the International Maritime Organization had already banned heavy fuel oil use in the Antarctic, and announced in April that it is moving toward a similar ban in the Arctic. Stand.earth applauded the moved and urged heavy fuel oil users like Carnival to follow suit.

Carnival has doubled down on a scrubber loophole in regulations allowing ship operators to continue burning dirt-cheap, ultra-dirty heavy fuel oil, even under stricter sulfur emissions standards. Carnival sought and was granted a special exemption in 2013 to keep burning heavy fuel oil after the creation of a stricter emissions control area around North America.

Carnival’s scrubbers are open-loop saltwater technology, which means it removes contaminants from the air pollution it creates, then discharging those contaminants into the ocean. When Carnival ships were tested in Alaska waters in 2016, hundreds of Clean Water Act violations for its acidic scrubber sludge discharges were found across 11 ships.

“Carnival promotes its scrubbers as evidence of how it cares for the environment, when in reality those scrubbers are merely evidence of the company’s care for its bottom line. Far from being a cure for Carnival’s environmental woes, scrubbers are a crutch propping up Carnival’s heavy fuel oil addiction.” -Kendra Ulrich, Senior Shipping Campaigner, Stand.earth

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Media contacts: Virginia Cleaveland, Press Secretary, virginia@stand.earth, 510-858-9902

Kendra Ulrich, Senior Shipping Campaigner, kendra@stand.earth, 360-255-3555