The current economic situation and its impact on the industry was “the hot topic” at the 2009 Annual Cruise Shipping Convention in Miami, though discussions on the impact cruise tourism has on the environment “was not covered enough,” reports this article by Vacation and Cruising. Fuel consumption by cruise ships, which includes energy use for laundry, restaurants, leisure club activities, water and waste treatment, can, according to a 2008 study, be nearly three times those of the new Airbus A380.

The Initiative “Peace with Nature”, which gives birth to the National Strategy for Climate Change, and which plans to convert Costa Rica in a C – Neutral country by the year 2021, asks for great changes and reveals big challenges to be overcome. This proposal invites us to redefine and re-invent our creative capacities in order to assume the greatest task human kind has ever faced both as a victimizer and as victim at the same time: to overcome the self imposed threat of climate change and global warming.

Let’s suppose that because of measures to mitigate climate change, e.g. carbon taxes or trading systems or whatever, travel gets much more expensive. Let’s say it gets twice as expensive as it is now, relative to your income – i.e., if you were to continue travelling as much as you do now, it would use up twice the proportion of your total income as it does now. (We’ve had a bit of experience of this recently, though unrelated to climate change, with oil price increases..).