You think climate change is not affecting you?
Global cocoa prices have hit a fresh record high as dry weather hurts crops in West Africa.
Cocoa prices on the New York commodities market reached a new all-time high of $5,874 (£4,655) a ton on Thursday.
The cost of the key ingredient for making chocolate has now roughly doubled since the start of last year.
Soaring cocoa prices are already filtering through to consumers and squeezing major chocolate makers.
On Thursday, one of the world’s biggest chocolate manufacturers Hershey warned: “Historic cocoa prices are expected to limit earnings growth this year.”
The company’s chief executive Michele Buck also did not rule out putting up prices for customers.
“We can’t talk about future pricing,” she said in a call with analysts but added, “given where cocoa prices are, we will be using every tool in our toolbox, including pricing, as a way to manage the business.”
Cocoa prices have been driven up by poor harvests in West Africa, which produces the bulk of global supply.
The El Niño weather phenomenon has been causing drier weather in Ghana and Ivory Coast, which are the world’s two biggest producers of cocoa beans.
Hotter temperatures and shifts in rainfall patterns caused by climate change can also have an impact on harvests.
“Traders are worried about another short production year and these feelings have been enhanced by El Niño that is threatening West Africa crops with hot and dry weather,” said Jack Scoville, an analyst at Price Futures Group.
Might hit more than chocolate and coffee:
Atlantic Ocean circulation nearing ‘devastating’ tipping point, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/09/atlantic-ocean-circulation-nearing-devastating-tipping-point-study-finds
Also recent news:
Ocean Sponge Skeletons Suggest a More Significant History of Global Warming Than Originally Thought
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ocean-sponge-skeletons-suggest-a-more-significant-history-of-global-warming-than-originally-thought-180983742/
Both suggest a rapid shift from fossil fuels, rather than the gradual shift we are currently implementing.
It would be a stretch to call what we are currently implimenting a gradual shift from fossil fuels. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49876
Also, an article today about lab grown meat failing to ‘meet’ earlier predictions:
The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/opinion/eat-just-upside-foods-cultivated-meat.html
“Yet despite nearly a decade of work and a great many messianic pronouncements, it is increasingly clear that a broader cultivated meat revolution was never a real prospect, and definitely not within the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe.
Interviews with almost 60 industry investors and insiders, including many who have been employed by or been part of the leadership teams of these companies, reveal a litany of squandered resources, broken promises and unproven science.” ….
“Now, as venture capital dries up across industries and this sector’s disappointing progress becomes more visible, the reckoning will be difficult for many to survive.” ….
“As expensive as that process is, it typically produces only “cell slurry,” a viscous mass. To turn it into something someone could eat (or sell), you’d need to mix in vegetable matter like pea and soy, for a kind of plant-animal hybrid. Or you could try something vastly more difficult: getting the animal cells to form into muscle-like tissue.
Making any of that happen affordably and at large volumes is a problem that even today no one has solved.” ….
““The unfortunate outlook that I’m required to have is one that is very long term,” he told me. “You have to have a view of not just the next 10 years, but the next 50 years.” The purpose isn’t racing to build a huge factory, he added. “The purpose is doing things that increase the likelihood that over the course of decades — I’m gulping saying ‘decades,’” he said. “I’m choking on these words.”” ….
“But as familiar as cultivated meat’s bumpy trajectory may be, one thing stands out: The industry, and in particular, its two biggest players, Upside Foods and Eat Just, built expensive facilities and pushed for government approval before they had overcome the most fundamental technological challenges.” ….
“Several of the industry veterans I spoke to were even more bearish. Joel Stone is a consultant who specializes in industrial biotechnology. I asked him how likely it was that within my lifetime even 10 percent of U.S. meat supply will be cultivated.
“If I was going to put odds on it, the odds would be zero,” he said, flatly.”
Chocolate and coffee. Now it is getting SERIOUS!!