“If all the ships on Earth were a single country, that country would be the sixth-largest polluter in the world.” This shocking fact comes from a recent NPR report by the Short Wave science podcast that delves into the dirty business of shipping, which as an industry ranks just behind Japan in its pollution levels. This is partly because of the gargantuan scale of the shipping industry, but it’s also in large part because these massive ships burn a particularly dirty heavy fuel oil, also known as bunker fuel. But there is something unique about the shipping industry’s relation to its carbon footprint. As climate reporter Rebecca Hersher told NPR, “I cover a lot of big pollution-heavy industries as a climate reporter. And shipping has something going for it that’s kind of cool, which is that they have publicly acknowledged that they have a problem – they’re dirty […] […]