The headline is only surprising if shipping is the majority of fuel use.

It isn’t. In the limit, if it were 100% of fuel use, then we’d be burning 1.2 gallons of fossil fuel to deliver 1 gallon, which clearly wouldn’t work.

A much better question is “what percentage of the embodied carbon for this good is from freight shipping”? The answer is almost always very low because last mile shipping dominates, and so does manufacturing the item. For fossil fuel, those things dominate, and so does the step where the customer burns the fuel.

Basically, the entire article is confused because it doesn’t start with the fossil fuel equivalent of Amdahl’s Law.