Can Global Shipping Go Zero Carbon?

Short Wave

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

A lot of the stuff we buy in the U.S. comes by ship — ships that use a particularly dirty kind of fuel. Now a big shipping company says it wants to go zero carbon. Climate reporter Becky Hersher tells us how some old tech might play a role and where that tech falls short. Follow Maddie on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:05.1	Becky Herscher, climate reporter, you told me this thing that blew my mind earlier,
0:09.3	that if all the ships that carry our stuff around the world were a country, that that
0:13.4	country would be the sixth largest polluter in the world.
0:16.9	Yeah, right after the nation of Japan.
0:19.8	Because here's the thing, there are thousands of huge ships and they carry like 90% of what
0:25.8	you buy here in the US.
0:27.8	Yeah. And they burn this extremely dirty fuel.
0:30.8	It's called heavy fuel oil.
0:32.0	Sometimes it's called bunker fuel.
0:33.5	That doesn't sound great.
0:34.6	Yeah.
0:35.3	And listen, I cover a lot of like big pollution heavy industries as a climate reporter.
0:40.6	And shipping has something going for it that's kind of cool, which is that they have
0:44.4	publicly acknowledged that they have a problem.
0:47.2	They're dirty.
0:48.0	That's the first step.
0:48.8	Hi, I'm shipping.
0:50.0	I have a problem and I have a problem and it is greenhouse gases.
0:53.6	And second, they're actually trying to change it, which is good.
0:56.9	So international regulators are already cracking down and this is kind of wild.
1:02.4	MERSC, the largest shipping company in the world has already promised to go zero carbon by 2050.
	...

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