One of the things I like about the Holland America cruises is the ship’s log they give at the end of the voyage. It is an interesting accountability document for key resources, especially water and fuel.

My recent cruise on the MS Rotterdam used 120 tons/day of fuel to travel a toal of 3529 nautical miles, moving a 780 foot vessel weighing 59,885 gross tons with a total of 1910 people for 12 days. While ships tend to be one of the dirtier transportation systems in use, what matters here is that the fuel consumption is reported.

More encouraging are the figures on water production — the ship produced 700 tons (185,000 gallons) of potable water per day. And we consumed 600 tons (158,000 gallons)of potable water.

That is what interests me — that the ship is generating usable resources — and that it is being transparent in the usage of both fuel and water. The floating city offers a useful template for shoreside cities to adopt as navigational tools for resource transparency and accountability.

What if cities reported household, business and total city resource consumption per day? How would that help us to become aware of how many planets our resource demands were consuming?