With the world’s two biggest coffee producers, Brazil and Vietnam, facing simultaneous droughts, future crops are in jeopardy and prices are on the rise. Now it’s getting personal.
As an enthusiastic coffee believer, this one hits hard. And I think that is the point here. Thanks for this insight into how we can keep moving this conversation forward with impacts now becoming part of our daily lives.
It's nice to hear from you, Joan! Absolutely, sitting politicians will be blamed for high food prices, in both our countries and I suspect pretty much everywhere else.
I think we're learning that it was a big mistake to expect people to "wake up" to climate change as its impacts get worse. That operates on a couple of levels.
If someone's right in the eye of the storm, literally or figuratively -- in Asheville or Jasper, in Lytton, B.C. or Paradise, California -- the day after you've lost everything is the absolute worst time to be lectured about climate change. John Vaillant, author of a brilliant book about the wildfire that took out much of Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2016, makes the point really well here: https://www.theenergymix.com/communicating-fire-spotlights-really-charismatic-symptom-of-climate-change-vaillant/
If a household is just barely getting by in a lousy economy -- the reference in today's Weekender to anyone who ever has to choose between food and fuel -- climate change won't be the top-of-mind issue, even if it's making that issue worse.
And in your industry, if meetings and hospitality people know they depend on vulnerable facilities like hotels and convention centres, not to mention airlines and other modes of transport, but the solutions are beyond their experience or job responsibilities and have been too heavily politicized by the fossil fuel industry...they aren't going to want to hear about climate change, either.
Which doesn't mean we submerge the issue or practice climate denial ourselves. Just that if we want the conversation to end well for all concerned, we need to find the common ground that will give us a starting point, as I suggest in this post.
You and I have known each other for long enough that we can both remember when I used to awfulize at meetings industry people about the dangers of climate change, then wonder why those conversations never got any traction. I absolutely agree the industry needs to move much farther, much faster on this, but TBH I don't think I helped that along one bit with the way I used to show up.
In recent years, it's actually been a lot of fun to challenge myself to see how far I can get into an "outside the bubble" conversation without invoking any of the standard "c-words" that I refer to in the post. It's a habit that has to be learned...but once you get used to it, you never look back. The interactions are so much richer and more genuine, you get to learn a tonne from people whose experience and perspectives are different from yours -- and it gets results!
My heart is appreciation of what you wrote, Mitchell. I posted it for those in hospitality. You'd think the horror of Hurricane Helene would have awakened people and it doesn't appear to have done so. Nothing does. In the US, no doubt they will blame the current Administration for the high price of coffee. Oh why do people not educate themselves?
As an enthusiastic coffee believer, this one hits hard. And I think that is the point here. Thanks for this insight into how we can keep moving this conversation forward with impacts now becoming part of our daily lives.
It's nice to hear from you, Joan! Absolutely, sitting politicians will be blamed for high food prices, in both our countries and I suspect pretty much everywhere else.
I think we're learning that it was a big mistake to expect people to "wake up" to climate change as its impacts get worse. That operates on a couple of levels.
If someone's right in the eye of the storm, literally or figuratively -- in Asheville or Jasper, in Lytton, B.C. or Paradise, California -- the day after you've lost everything is the absolute worst time to be lectured about climate change. John Vaillant, author of a brilliant book about the wildfire that took out much of Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2016, makes the point really well here: https://www.theenergymix.com/communicating-fire-spotlights-really-charismatic-symptom-of-climate-change-vaillant/
If a household is just barely getting by in a lousy economy -- the reference in today's Weekender to anyone who ever has to choose between food and fuel -- climate change won't be the top-of-mind issue, even if it's making that issue worse.
And in your industry, if meetings and hospitality people know they depend on vulnerable facilities like hotels and convention centres, not to mention airlines and other modes of transport, but the solutions are beyond their experience or job responsibilities and have been too heavily politicized by the fossil fuel industry...they aren't going to want to hear about climate change, either.
Which doesn't mean we submerge the issue or practice climate denial ourselves. Just that if we want the conversation to end well for all concerned, we need to find the common ground that will give us a starting point, as I suggest in this post.
You and I have known each other for long enough that we can both remember when I used to awfulize at meetings industry people about the dangers of climate change, then wonder why those conversations never got any traction. I absolutely agree the industry needs to move much farther, much faster on this, but TBH I don't think I helped that along one bit with the way I used to show up.
In recent years, it's actually been a lot of fun to challenge myself to see how far I can get into an "outside the bubble" conversation without invoking any of the standard "c-words" that I refer to in the post. It's a habit that has to be learned...but once you get used to it, you never look back. The interactions are so much richer and more genuine, you get to learn a tonne from people whose experience and perspectives are different from yours -- and it gets results!
My heart is appreciation of what you wrote, Mitchell. I posted it for those in hospitality. You'd think the horror of Hurricane Helene would have awakened people and it doesn't appear to have done so. Nothing does. In the US, no doubt they will blame the current Administration for the high price of coffee. Oh why do people not educate themselves?