From ClimateREALISM

By H. Sterling Burnett

Grist posted a story blaming climate change for a recent rise in coffee prices. This is false, coffee production and yields have improved amid modest warming. As a result, Grist must seek another cause for higher prices.

In the story, “Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher,” Grist staff writer, Frida Garza, spends 85 percent of her story describing how the tariffs President Donald Trump is imposing on Vietnam will likely affect a recently developed artisanal coffee company, using organically grown Vietnamese Robusta blends, and then generalizing the claims to the impacts on coffee from other growing regions like Brazil. Note, despite climate change leading in the title, so far the story only discusses the potential impacts of tariffs on future coffee prices.

Only the last section of the story deals with climate change, and then only to imply that climate change has caused recent droughts that have affected some coffee growers.

“Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business,” writes Garza. “Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce.”

Except in the misleading title of the story, nowhere does Garza specifically argue that climate change has caused droughts, with attendant coffee shortages, resulting in higher prices. Which is good, as far as it goes, since there is no evidence climate change is causing worsening droughts or causing a decline in coffee production or harvests. As such, one can only surmise Garza used “climate change” as a hook to snag readers attention.

Concerning drought, Climate Realism has posted more than 100 stories rebutting false media claims that climate change has made the occurrences of drought more frequent or severe, here, here, and for Brazil, here, for instance.

Garza can’t draw support for her suggestion that climate change is causing worsening drought conditions from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, either. In its most recent report, the 2021 Sixth Assessment report, the IPCC distinguishes four categories of drought: hydrological, meteorological, ecological, and agricultural. The IPCC finds no evidence climate change has increased the number, duration, or intensity of hydrological or meteorological droughts, and it has only medium confidence it has “contributed to changes in agricultural and ecological droughts and has led to an increase in the overall affected land area.”

Even for ecological and agricultural droughts the data is a mixed bag. The IPCC divides the world into 47 separate regions of study when analyzing drought trends, and its data suggest ecological and agricultural drought may have increased during the period of modest warming in 12 of those 47 regions. However, in only two of those regions does the IPCC have even “medium confidence” for any human role in the observed increase. For the remaining regions experiencing a possible increase in droughts, the IPCC has low confidence human activities have had any discernible impact.

Climate change can’t be blamed for causing a phenomenon, increasing drought frequency and severity, that is not happening.

Nor is there evidence in either coffee production data or price data that climate change is causing a crisis.

In response to the Grist article and one from earlier in the year published by the New York Times, climate researcher Bjorn Lomborg posted a short but thorough refutation on X, showing that prices in recent years and decades are neither records, nor even higher then average when compared to the past. (see below)

Lomborg then provided this helpful chart:

Dozens of articles posted at Climate Realism examine and debunk previous false claims made in myriad mainstream media stories that climate change has caused a decline in coffee yields and production, resulting in rising prices. Data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show relatively steady gains in coffee yields and production in Vietnam, Brazil, and for the world as a whole between 1994 and 2023, with new records for both being set with some regularity. (see the graph below).

Since coffee production and yields have increased dramatically overtime, it is simply false to link higher coffee prices to climate change induced impacts on production. During the recent period of slight global warming, coffee, like almost every other crop, has seen gains due to the fertilization effect of higher CO2 and improved growing conditions. Since climate change isn’t disrupting coffee production, it can’t be blamed for any rise in prices.

In the end, despite the title, Garza’s article is mostly speculation about potential future impacts of the Trump administration’s tariffs on future coffee prices, with a little climate alarm unjustifiably thrown in for no identifiable reason. The story as a whole is pure carnival sideshow prognostication. Will tariffs cause higher coffee prices? Maybe, maybe not. But whatever has contributed to recent increases in coffee prices, prices that are still below historic averages and highs, and there is no evidence whatsoever that climate change has anything to do with it. That is the truth. Based on the evidence of this story, Grist is evidently not in the business of telling the truth.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.

Roger Caiazza

A recent article from the Daily Caller News Foundation explained that even New York Governor Hochul has realized that the state’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) is too extreme.  This is an update on my related net-zero transition battle to force the state to pause implementation.  Hopefully it will inspire similar resistance in your jurisdictions.

Even the most zealous climate activist must admit that there is a limit to how much any jurisdiction can afford to spend to implement an energy transition program to eliminate fossil fuels.  Of course, as soon as costs come up, activists conjure cost estimates that claim that fossil-free nirvana will be cheaper and if negative externalities are considered then the cost of inaction is more than the cost of action.  That baloney is not the topic of this post.

The fact is that net-zero transition policies have always been about politics and money, not rational thought.  New York’s implementation progress has reached the point where the costs of the transition are too large to ignore. 

The Daily Caller article referenced a letter written by Donna DeCarolis and Dennis Elsenbeck, two members of the Climate Action Council that approved the implementation outline for the Climate Act.  They requested a hearing with the Public Service Commission (PSC) to consider delaying the state’s climate goals citing several circumstances that warrant a hearing based on Public Service Law (PSL) 66-P that implements the renewable energy program mandated by the Climate Act.

The article also included extensive quotes by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul: “I was intent on becoming known as a strong environmental governor.”   She made the remarks in early August, according to local news outlet Spectrum News. “I also cannot ignore the fact that the disruptions in our economy that have occurred since the laws went into place, but also since we even supported this, that need to be examined in terms of what is happening to people’s pocketbooks right now. … I also have to moderate and make sure that I’m not doing something that’s going to drive up costs for consumers, and the data shows at this time it would.”  In my opinion, the political machine of the governor has realized they have a problem.

So far there has been no response from the Hochul Administration to the DeCarolis and Elsenbeck letter.

Personal War

My personal fight against the Climate Act consists primarily of articles on my blog and the occasional post here.  I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on Climate Act implementation plans, and have written over 550 articles about New York’s net-zero transition.  I have also submitted comments in various Public Service Commission proceedings.  The primary themes of my comments have been the affordability and reliability risks of a future electric system that relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage and the fact that there is a New York regulation that established boundary conditions for the transition. The PSL 66-P law and the circumstances that warrant consideration of a PSC hearing were referenced in the DeCarolis and Elsenbeck letter.

I have joined forces with Richard Ellenbogen, Constatine Kontogiannis, and Francis Menton to wage war on the Climate Act.  Ellenbogen is an electrical engineer who is President of Allied Converters where he has pioneered how “green” manufacturing can work.  Constantine Kontogiannis is an engineer who has decades of experience providing energy consulting services.  Menton is a retired lawyer and now writes articles at his Manhattan Contrarian blog that are frequently featured here.

We intervened in the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation (NMPC) dba National Grid and the Consolidated Edison Company of New York utility rate cases.  In both cases, we included testimony arguing that PSL 66-p should be considered in the context of the rate case programs included to meet requirements of the Climate Act.  The Department of Public Service (DPS) staff response to our arguments boils down to “rate cases are not the appropriate forum to consider limitations of the renewable energy program”. 

In response we submitted a filing in a generic proceeding.  My compatriots and I believe that when the net-zero transition claims are compared to reality they fail.  To prove that is an enormous effort that I described in a post at my blog.  In brief, our submittal includes the primary filing, two exhibits documenting the customers in arrears safety valve trigger, and five supporting exhibits.  The primary filing argues that Public Service Law Section 66-p(4) contains the aforementioned safety valve provisions.   Exhibit 1 – Trend in Company Customers in Arrears documents increasing trends in utility customer payment delinquencies, providing baseline data for the customers in arrears safety valve trigger.  I did a separate post providing details of those calculations.  Exhibit 2 – Customers in Arrears is a spreadsheet that contains the detailed analytical data on utility arrears across New York’s major distribution companies. 

The remainder of the exhibits support the need for the filing, additional circumstances that demonstrate that the broad mandate to ensure access to safe, reliable utility service at just and reasonable rates has not been addressed in the current implementation process, a demonstration that the current approach is actually increasing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and a recommendation for an alternative approach.  Exhibit 3 – Affordability-Focused Recommendations outlines specific policy recommendations to address energy affordability concerns, including proposals for cost transparency, alternative funding mechanisms, and enhanced low-income programs.  Exhibit 4 – Resource Gap Characterization analyzes gaps between CLCPA mandates and available resources, addressing both financial and infrastructure capacity constraints.  Exhibit 5 – Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources explains that the need for a resource that is not currently commercially available risks investments in false solutions.  Exhibit 6 – Electrification Increases Emissions presents analysis demonstrating that certain electrification strategies may paradoxically increase emissions. Finally, Exhibit 7 – Alternative Approach proposes alternative implementation pathways that could achieve reasonable climate goals while maintaining affordability and reliability.

Conclusion

The Climate Act is and always will be political theater.  New York has never done a feasibility analysis because the politicians and the activists who wrote the law naively believed that the net-zero transition was only a matter of political will.  It has always been inevitable that New York’s net-zero transition would collapse because of physics and costs issues that would have been flagged in a proper feasibility analysis.  Now that the consequences of ignoring the fundamentals are becoming so evident that they cannot be ignored, the search is on for an excuse to pause implementation.  The filing we submitted argues that there are already provisions in place to reconsider the schedule that provides the excuse.  When a hearing is held, the ambition of the transition will be exposed to reality as well.

Not surprisingly, there has been no response to our filing.  My colleagues and I are plotting ways to get the PSC to respond and spreading the word is at the top of the list.  New Yorkers reading this should contact their elected officials and ask them to demand that the PSC respond to our filing and the letter from DeCarolis and Elsenbeck.

Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.