The popular Crew Center blog published an article last week titled Smoke From First Cruise Ship of Alaska Season Alarms Juneau Residents. It mentioned that in mid-April, Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL)’s cruise ship, Norwegian Bliss, sailed into Juneau, becoming the first ship to arrive in the Alaskan capital and officially launching the 2025 cruise season. “While the ship’s return was greeted by many with excitement, its arrival sparked controversy after concerns were raised about the amount of smoke coming from the vessel.”

Crew Center mentioned that a local resident in Alaska, Scott Ranger, posted a letter together with a photo taken by environmental advocate Kate Troll which brought attention to the unusually heavy emissions coming from the Bliss. His letter discussed NCL’s irresponsibility and poor community relations.

“Much of Juneau was excited to welcome the first visitors of the year. A significant part of Juneau was not. I’m pretty much in the first category as I take folks whale watching from the cruise ships. Yesterday, I immediately moved into the second category. The attached photograph shows why. I’m used to the Norwegian Jewel and Sun spewing copious amounts of exhaust, but not the Bliss or the Encore as they are much newer ships. This is not good.

Norwegian doesn’t have the best reputation in Juneau for “community relations” and the Bliss’s entry yesterday was published widely in our town. Folks like me were astonished and maddened that, in an era when cruise ship overload for communities like Juneau is growing rapidly, a major cruise line with a “new” ship would enter with such little regard to the air of our pretty darned pristine place.

If the cruise line continues operating like this, polluting one of the nicest places on the planet, opposition will grow rapidly. We have a second initiative to place legal, hard limits on cruise ships to Juneau. What the Bliss did yesterday will pretty much insure that enough signatures will be gathered to put it on the ballot and that many more people will vote for it than last year’s initiative.

This is an ignominious way to begin the 2025 cruise ship season.”

NCL has not issued a public response.

The spectacle of the NCL ship smoking up the port in Juneau reinvigorated the debate over the future of the oversized cruise tourism in Alaska. Last year, voters in Juneau rejected a ballot initiative to ban cruise ships from docking on Saturdays. Images like the Norwegian Bliss bellowing smoke over the port seemingly has motivated efforts to continue its push for regulations over the cruise industry.

Crew Center also mentioned that in March of this year a plume of smoke from the Norwegian Epic raised alarm while the ship was docked in the British Virgin Islands. The local Environmental Health Division conducted an air quality assessment, ultimately finding the emissions were allegedly within “safe limits” but urging the cruise line to consider switching to low-sulfur fuel while at berth to improve port air quality.

Apologists for the cruise line will undoubtedly argue that the smoke is just “water vapor” from the scrubbers installed on the NCL cruise ship. That what you are seeing is actually not toxic smoke but just some harmless vapor. Cruise ship advocates argue that you “shouldn’t trust your lying eyes,” essentially a variation of the question posed by Groucho Marx (or, more recently, Richard Pryor) – “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

“It’s not pollution, it’s just harmless water vapor” or similar blatherskite is the common refrain whenever NCL, Royal Caribbean or one of the Carnival Corporation brand ships belch emissions over a port due to burning high sulfur fuel.

NCL and other lines have done this before many times and will continue to pollute in the future. Will you be really choose to ignore your own eyes and believe the cruise lines when they tell you everything is fine?

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Photo credits: Norwegian Bliss – Kate Troll; Norwegian Epic – Jacqueline Archibald; Norwegian Pearl in Juneau / Photo credit Tim Olson / KTOO Public Radio,.