Allow me to introduce you to Edy. He is the chief engineer on-board the CMA CGM Lamartine, and the overlord of anything below the deck. A different world entirely! It is a dark, grubby, roaringly loud world where people toil to keep the engine turning and the boat churning. This beast gets through fifty metric tons of fuel per day. If the engine was attached to a generator rather than propellers, it could power a town the size of Northampton.
And yet, Edy assures me, this is still the most efficient way of transporting goods. Unbelievably, freighting by air releases twenty times the amount of CO2 per ton mile than by sea, and on top of that, greenhouse gases can be up to three times as damaging when released at high altitude as they are when released on the planet's surface.
Environmentalists would love to apply this comparison to passenger travel as well, but the efficiency of moving passengers around the world does differ from moving cargo. Humans are not freight, after all, so the more spacious design and increased facilities on passenger boats mean their efficiency is less than that of a cargo ship.
That said, despite being less efficient than cargo ships, travel by ferry does have environmental credentials. One return flight from Heathrow to Bilbao, for example, clocks up about 280kg of CO2 emissions per passenger, compared with just 90kg for a return ferry trip from Portsmouth to Bilbao.
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