Valve video gaming cofounder Gabe Newell designed his own megayacht in collaboration with Oceanco — a custom job so custom that he actually acquired the entire Oceanco company this summer, according to Megayacht News. 

Leviathan has room for 26 guests and 37 crew. It's 364 feet with a lab, dive center, and medical center. The ship can also accommodate 54 people for dinner on the main deck. 

Crew areas reportedly feature a 3D-printing shop, basketball court, and sundeck with a hot tub. Newell has said his goal is to improve crew well-being so they can attend to guests to the best of their abilities. He also said he believes yachts are perfect for scientific discoveries. 

"We knew we were asking for unusual things," Newell said.

Some of those unusual things, fortunately, are sustainability features that help to reduce the yacht's environmental impact. The yacht reportedly features a diesel-electric hybrid system not too unlike a Prius in principle, with a 5.5 megawatt-hour battery, along with a waste heat recovery system and advanced wastewater treatment tech. 

But while Leviathan is the height of luxury and does make noble efforts to offset its pollution, it's also still a heavily polluting creation in the first place, continuing to highlight the wider industry problem that Newell is at least sensitive enough to to make real investments to address. 

One of the problems is that yachts in this class each require their operating fuel to run most features, such as climate control and humidity settings that are essential for maintenance, and running them even partially from diesel power is polluting in a similar way to running gas generators to power several homes. 

The results for traditional superyachts and megayachts are especially bad. For example, according to an article in The Guardian, a megayacht designed and owned by Roman Abramovich and worth more than $800 million produces 22,000 metric tons of toxic gases annually. 

These megayachts run on dirty energy sources that warm the planet, contributing to the intensifying of extreme weather events and other side effects such as glaciers melting faster than they otherwise would, which plays a factor in the rising sea levels scientists have charted across recent decades. 

Fortunately, Newell's Oceanco made efforts to address this, and some yacht builders are going even further.

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For example, Silent Yachts in 2024 created a solar-powered yacht. Sunreef Yachts created a solar-powered boat that also uses wind power and all-electric propulsion and has several all-electric, eco-friendly yachts in its lineup. 

In 2022, Canada put a 10% tax on luxury yachts, private jets, and cars. The goal was to discourage people from buying vehicles that emit polluting gases. According to Boat International, however, it is set to remove this tax. 

There is no simple answer to curbing megayacht pollution since billionaires will continue to buy them. According to The Guardian article, an opinion piece by Chris Armstrong, a professor of political theory at the University of Southampton: "If you can afford to buy a megayacht, you can probably afford to pay the tax on it too. If megayachts are fuelling climate catastrophe, taxing them might not be enough."

If these yachts become more commonplace, solutions for their contributions to the warming of the planet need to be explored further to find something that will make them much less damaging.

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