i chuckled a long time after reading this

Oil Tanker Saves Carbon-Neutral Yachters
By Kate Galbraith
BBC News The crew of the Fleur, a carbon-free yacht, was rescued by an oil tanker last week.
Carbon-neutral travel on the high seas has its perils.
“An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth on a 5,000-mile carbon emission-free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker,” the BBC reported.
Apparently, a trio of environmentally-minded seamen had set sail from the town of Plymouth in Great Britain on April 19, aiming to make a “carbon neutral” journey to Greenland with the aid of solar power and, of course, the wind.
But the solar panels got “ripped from the yacht” amid rough weather, and the winds – reaching 68 miles per hour – were so harsh that they knocked over the boat (named the “Fleur”) several times.
The sailors issued a Mayday call late last week, and in a twist that has struck some Web commenters as the height of irony, the Overseas Yellowstone, an oil tanker loaded with 680,000 barrels of crude oil, came to their rescue roughly 400 miles off of Ireland’s west coast.
The rescued sailors have expressed “heartfelt thanks” to the tanker’s crew and will reach land in Maine in a few days.
The travails of the sailors feed into a broader debate about the merits of eco-tourism. As this blog’s editor, Tom Zeller Jr., has written in a column, there are important questions about “how to strike a balance between appreciating the natural world through firsthand experience and protecting it by staying away — and staying at home?”
“I think it’s fair to say that ’sustainable tourism’ is an oxymoron,” said Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co. in Colorado, in the column.
(Our thanks to Bradford Plumer at The Vine for flagging this item.)