Why CO2 emissions from luxury yachts are morally outrageous, even if they are offset

Photo de Arno Senoner sur Unsplash

It is estimated that there are around 12,000 superyachts in circulation (Boat International n.d.), defined as private yachts over 24 metres (the vast majority of which are motor driven). According to a report by Allied Market Research (2023), the international superyacht market has more than doubled from 2022 to 2023, and growth forecasts for the next decade remain very high. The world's top 300 superyachts are responsible for an estimated total of around 315,000 tCO2, or an average of more than 1,000 tCO2 per yacht (Lynch et al. 2019). This is more than 360 times the individual average emissions that we would need to achieve by 2030 to stay within the 1.5 ºC Paris mitigation target (between 2.5-3.2 tCO2 per capita, depending on the intensity of use of negative emission technologies, see Koide et al. 2021).

Political philosopher Chris Armstrong (2023) recently suggested that using a superyacht is an act of “climate vandalism”. And indeed, given that an ambitious mitigation target such as the one set out in the Paris Agreement means dealing with a very tight budget of sustainable emissions, superyacht users are either forcing other people to significantly reduce their emissions so as not to exhaust the carbon budget prematurely, or contributing to an overshoot of the mitigation target that society has chosen to pursue. Either way, spending the summer on a floating villa does not seem like a good justification. Of course, in addition to their environmental impact, superyachts also bring economic benefits to some, most notably the tourism businesses in the seaside resorts where they are moored. But if the climatic harm they cause is far greater than the social benefit they bring, as is almost always the case, this raises serious questions about both distributive justice and social efficiency.

Superyacht users, however, have a straightforward response to this type of criticism: they can resort to carbon offsetting - paying others to create negative emissions that offset those of their yachts. Some already claim to do this (Huddleston 2021), and others could easily turn to the carbon offsetting services offered by the same superyacht industry. Environmental critics of superyachts might counter that in many cases carbon offsetting schemes have been shown to be deceptive and unreliable. There are at least three problems with the effectiveness of carbon offsetting schemes (Gabbatiss et al. 2023). First, many companies that offer polluters the opportunity to fund carbon offset projects tend to overestimate the amount of CO2 that these projects actually reduce. Second, the storage of CO2 as a result of carbon offset projects is not always permanent – for example, if trees are planted to offset emissions, it is important to ensure that these trees are not cut down in the near future. Thirdly, carbon offset projects are not always truly additional, i.e. they are not always the direct result of payment by the polluter to whom the offset is attributed. Yacht users, on the other hand, may argue that they are not directly responsible for carbon offsets and that if carbon offsets do not work, the problem must be solved by the companies that operate them and the authorities that have to monitor them.

There are a number of considerations that can be made in support of the carbon footprint argument, and that I believe could justify a legislative crackdown on superyachts, despite the fact that the rich can buy carbon offsets and are not responsible for any mismanagement. Although motor yachts, even large ones, were originally intended mainly for people who could afford to travel by sea without giving up the comforts of a good hotel, in recent years superyachts have become a textbook example of what economists call “conspicuous consumption” (after the late 19th century sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen), i.e. goods that are purchased much more for the social status they signify than for the utility the consumer derives from their practical use.

This is, for example, one of the theses defended by the French sociologist Grégory Salle 2024) in his recent book “Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide”, according to which the main purpose of moving around in large and luxurious boats is to make visible and, if we like, easily measurable wealth that would otherwise remain intangible to most people in the form of financial assets – we might also add that, as a marker of social status, superyachts are superior both to houses, in that they are mobile, and to private jets, in that they are exposed in crowded places such as bays, beaches, harbours, and so on. Evidence of this, as Salle himself mentions in his book, is the fact that the average size of superyachts is constantly increasing, to the point where the largest of them now have great technical difficulties docking in some ports, even those designed to accommodate large boats. According to data analysed by SuperyachtNews (2019), the average length of superyachts has increased by more than 10 metres in the last 25 years. So we seem to be facing what the economist Robert Frank (2008) describes as a “positional arms race”, the phenomenon whereby people with great economic means chase each other in the purchase of ever larger social markers, to the point where they completely lose sight of the practical aspect of what they are buying, leading to an appalling waste of social resources.

I think at least three points can be made. First, given that there are legitimate doubts about the effectiveness of many of the existing carbon offset schemes, a positional arms race between billionaires is surely not a good enough reason to take the risk of producing net positive CO2. In addition, some forms of carbon offsetting (e.g. bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) lead to intensive use of an important but limited resource such as land, and in many cases have been accompanied by the more or less violent displacement of indigenous communities. In view of these side-effects of carbon offsets, it could be argued that they should be used to cancel out emissions that are difficult to avoid and/or abate, certainly not those of a small group of billionaires who could happily spend the summer on land. Moreover, even if carbon offsets were fully effective and without side-effects, they would be a palliative, delaying the urgent changes that a growing and increasingly polluting industry like luxury yachting needs to make.

Second, increased positional consumption by the wealthiest tends to be reflected in increased positional consumption by those further down the social ladder, as it pushes up the parameters of acceptable consumption for these other people – Robert Frank refers to this phenomenon as “expenditure cascades” (see Frank et al. 2014). In this case, it is reasonable to assume that as more of the ultra-rich choose to signal their social status by buying and using a superyacht, so many other less affluent people will be induced to buy smaller boats or resort to charter services. Of course, quantifying any expenditure cascade induced by the expansion of the superyacht fleet would require empirical analysis. However, it is interesting to note that the growth of the superyacht sector in recent years has been accompanied by general growth in the global yacht market, which is estimated to be worth EUR 33 billion in 2022, a whopping 11% increase on the previous year (Salone Nautico Genoa 2024).

Third, the fact that such large and conspicuous CO2 emissions as those from superyachts are tolerated by public institutions could hinder the implementation of climate mitigation policies. On the one hand, it could lead some people to believe that the climate crisis is now less serious than it appears, and that stricter regulation of much less polluting and much less extravagant goods such as cars, houses, air travel, etc. is therefore disproportionate. On the other hand, many people may feel a sense of injustice. If collective emissions are to be radically reduced, why not start with those of millionaire holidaymakers who have plenty of valid leisure alternatives?