This was published 7 years ago
The everyday horror of our climate change future
By John Birmingham
At last, a consequence of climate change horrifying enough to shock anyone into action. Eight dollar flat whites!
I was unpleasantly surprised to read the announcement at my local java hut that they'd be taking a four dollar bite out of me for a flattie as of tomorrow. Not as shocked and awed as I was to pay five bucks for a lukewarm cup of brown crayon-flavoured water in Sydney a while back. But still pretty shook up.
Where will we get a decent latte after
How much worse can it get?
Technically, scientists say 'heaps'.
A report commissioned for Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand projects the loss of up to half the world's coffee plantations to climate change. A hundred and twenty million poor people living in places like Tanzania and Guatemala will lose their livelihoods – which is bad, but what's worse is I'll be affected!
We've previously discussed my ruinous caffeine addiction, which runs to many thousands of dollars a year. I don't want to contemplate the consequences of a collapse in the supply side of that equation. The great coffee houses like Lavazza, and the not so great ones like Starbucks, are all warning of doom.
Coffee, unlike climate change deniers, cannot be found everywhere. The magic bean has very specific climatic requirements and even a small rise in the mercury can kill off vast swathes of the stuff. It's not just the temperature, though. With a change in long term climate comes changes in weather patterns that favour the predators like the coffee berry borer and coffee rust, described by the Union of Concerned Scientists as "a devastating fungus that previously did not survive the cool mountain weather."
This is serious, people.
I'm not joking any more. I can barely afford to maintain my addiction as it is. I'm willing to put up with dust storms, water wars and the end of civilisation as we know it – if only because of the opportunity it offers to stalk the arid wastelands laying my savage post-apocalyptic vigilante justice on those idiots who ruined everything.
But I'll be damned if I can contemplate crawling out of my dustbowl humpy every morning without a decent cup of coffee to send me on my vengeance-seeking way.
On the upside, I guess when I do encounter a lone surviving climate change denier crawling through the badlands claiming it's just sunspots, I'll be a lot more murderous without my morning brew. So there's that.