Will Climate Change Murder All the Coffee?
Oh, maybe: "What we are really seeing as a company as we look 10, 20, 30 years down the road—if conditions continue as they are—is a potentially significant risk to our supply chain, which is the Arabica coffee bean," says Jim Hanna, the sustainability director at Starbucks (a bottom line-focused coffee chain whose name you might recognize).
The Guardian reports that Hanna's popping over to Washington, D.C. today to tell Congress that they should probably do something about climate change besides deny its existence, before all the hurricanes and bugs totally ruin coffee forever and take away the only remaining reason for us to get up in the morning. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that's hosting the event where Starbucks and others will brief Congress, reports that the coffee supply has already declined enough to prompt sellers to increase their prices by 25 percent or more in the past year. Coffee could become a delicacy affordable only to the One Percent—which includes many Congress members, so why should they even care about this problem, come to think of it.
Starbucks and other businesses have also been trying to get the Obama administration to act on climate change, Hanna says, but so far, well, you know—what Al Gore said.
