Environmental Talk

Bigger threat than global warming? ….

Petroleum is the world’s largest traded commodity. The second largest is coffee.

So, the only real surprise here is how long it took someone to link drinking coffee with global warming. As long as we’re breaking our addiction to foreign oil, why not work on the coffee addiction, too?

According to the figures from the Your Eco Source blog, your morning cup of coffee is responsible for half-a-pound of CO2 emissions and the deforestation of 45 square feet of rain forest a day.

Somebody once said, “If you torture the data long enough, Nature will confess.” In the climate change debate, it seems like a daily occurrence that two scientists, working from the exact same physical data, somehow manage to come to diametrically opposed conclusions.

Statistics get tossed around like ten dollar chips in the World Series of Poker. For the most part, it seems it is the global warming advocates who rely on exaggeration and hyperbole to create a sense of impending doom.

For the sake of argument, let’s suspend disbelief for a second and take the 45-square-foot-per-cup figure as legit.

If you’re ordering a two-shot, double skim, half-caf, venti chai latte with lo-cal whipped cream and a dusting of nutmeg, your numbers will be slightly higher due to the energy required to run the cappuccino machine and the carbon dioxide emitted by the heavy sighs of people in line behind you.

Let’s consider that Dunkin’ Donuts sells 2.7 million cups of coffee a day. That means that, counting just those people who get their coffee from the same place I do, we knock off about 2800 acres a day from the rain forest. It seems like a good cold snap in the Northeast could pretty much take down a whole chunk of Brazil.

If we go with the total world-wide figure of two billion cups of coffee a day, we get 90 billion square feet of purported biosphere carnage a day or about two million acres.

It’s enough to make you switch to decaf just to calm your nerves.

Combine this with figures that put the deforestation rate at 55 square feet per hamburger consumed and it’s pretty clear we should have run out of rain forests somewhere back when Carter was president.

So, let’s recap ….

To save the planet we need to skip morning coffee, stop drinking bottled water, eliminate meat from our diets and only drink juice from fruit grown within 25 miles of where we purchase it. The occasional home-grown salad is okay but only if you have a water-conserving sprinkler and compost your own garbage.

My own opinion is that under that scenario we’d hasten our own extinction due to the absolutely foul mood we’d all be in on a daily basis. It would make going to the mall look like a scene from Resident Evil.

I guess it could work … but only after I’ve had my second cup of coffee.

global warming, climate change, Resident Evil, Dunkin’ Donuts, Al Gore, rain forests, rainforests, Brazilian wax