The bustling, working Port of Durrës recently had a regal visitor. "Opera," a superyacht, visited Albania's busiest harbor to guzzle diesel by the hundreds of thousands of liters.
"Owned by an Abu Dhabi prince, the $450 million Opera superyacht is so massive that it not only towered over the cargo cranes in Albania's busiest harbor but made container stacks look like Lego bricks," reported Luxury Launches.
The boat was constructed by German yacht builder Lurssen, who is well-known among billionaires. Coming in at just under 12,000 GT (gross tonnage, a metric used to express the internal volume of a ship) and 479 feet, Opera ranks among the world's largest vessels.
"Even a refueling task becomes a big deal when involving a vessel as big as the Opera superyacht. The yacht was supplied with around 320,000 liters of diesel," reported Luxury Launches.
Superyachts are among the most environmentally damaging assets owned by the ultra‑wealthy. Oxfam estimates "the average annual carbon footprint of each of these yachts to be 5,672 tonnes. It would take the average person 860 years to emit the same pollution."
"If everyone on Earth emitted planet-warming gases at the same rate as the average billionaire, the remaining carbon budget to stay within 1.5C would be gone in less than two days, the Oxfam analysis said, rather than current estimates of four years if carbon emissions remain as they are today," reported Jonathan Watts for the Guardian.
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Oxfam's senior climate justice policy adviser Chiara Putaturo put it more bluntly: "The evidence is clear: the extreme emissions of the richest, from their luxury lifestyles and even more from their polluting investments, are fuelling inequality, hunger and threatening lives."
Superyacht pollution is exempt from many international regulations. Billionaires can register these destructive vessels in countries with lax environmental and tax laws (e.g., Panama, the Cayman Islands, or the Marshall Islands) to avoid scrutiny. Because of this, they remain largely unchecked — a status symbol with destructive costs
However, there are many concrete efforts worldwide to reduce the increasing number of superyachts. Ports are starting to charge higher fees or deny entry to yachts altogether. And policy-makers and researchers are working to increase taxes on private jets and superyachts, which amount to pocket change for the ultra-wealthy, but would have major impacts on the 99%.
Tax pressure is not the only tactic for tackling these super-polluters. Innovation is also a path forward. Superyacht builders like Lürssen are working on yachts that operate without diesel, instead using fuel-cell technology.
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Definitely 👍 "Peter Lürssen first announced the yard's commitment to fuel cell development in 2021, describing the system as more efficient and easier to maintain than traditional diesel engines," according to Yacht Buyer.
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