I didn’t really drink coffee until I was in my 30s. The nice way to explain it is that I don’t naturally need supplemental energy. The less charitable version is something along the lines of: Good god, man, don’t feed it a stimulant!
This story starts with a girl. I liked her a lot, so I would buy her little gifts, hoping she’d look past my glaring deficiencies. She drank a lot of coffee. Her mornings would start at Starbucks, where she’d buy one of those quart-sized mixtures of melted ice cream and cocaine. (I believe it’s called a “venti latte.”) The first thing I bought her was a very large reusable mug.
As we got more serious, so did my gifts. I started pinging my coffee-nerd friends for ideas. First came the French press; then the Chemex. And then, in a bid to get her to spend more time at my place, I picked up a Japanese flat-bottomed pour-over dripper and a burr grinder the size of a small television. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, so I didn’t have to wander far to find a mustachioed man with opinions about French Existentialism to sell me a pound of excellent single-origin beans.
Up until this point, I was just trying to impress a lady. But along the way, as I worked on my barista skills, I started taking sips of the brew to see how I was doing. That’s when I realized that, when made with care, coffee can taste like the delicious savory fruit juice that it is. (Coffee “beans” are actually the pits of coffee fruits.) More than a decade later, I start every day with two cups, and the girl is now my wife. High-five, coffee! We did it!
Except, uh, whoa.
By the time it’s dancing with our taste buds, a cup of brewed coffee has cost us about 280 grams of CO2. In my 4-cups-per-day household, we’re pumping out close to a half-ton of planet-warming gas per year—before 8 a.m.!
Coffee isn’t gentle on the planet. Neither of the two most popular varieties of beans—arabica and robusta—grow in the United States in any real quantity. If you’re drinking a grind that doesn’t have a different nation’s name emblazoned on it, you’re probably consuming a product of Brazil, Vietnam, or both. Both of those countries have recently experienced climate-related weather events that have impacted coffee harvests, but that’s a whole ’nother story. For this one, we’re talking about how those beans are a long way from home, usually traveling by container ship. Some fancy ones transit in specialized refrigerated containers. Some even travel by plane.
Once the coffee arrives in our country, it’s usually roasted using electricity or some form of petroleum gas. Then it’s packaged, shipped, ground, and brewed. By the time it’s dancing with our taste buds, a cup of brewed coffee has cost us about 280 grams of CO2. In my 4-cups-per-day household, we’re pumping out close to a half-ton of planet-warming gas per year—before 8 a.m.!
I’ll spoil the ending for you right now: Brown Town isn’t quitting coffee. My wife would turn into a fire-breathing monster and single-handedly destroy every coffeehouse in a 100-mile radius out of rage. (We have a kid, so she can’t go to prison until after high school.)
So, what do we do? We made concessions. I drink my coffee black, and my wife takes oat milk in hers, which results in only about a quarter of the planet-warming gas of dairy milk. This doesn’t solve the problem completely, but if we lightened our 4 cups the old-fashioned way, our daily habit could be twice as bad. We also compost our spent grounds rather than sending them to the landfill, which doesn’t erase the CO2 but does avoid creating even more emissions—namely methane.
Still: A lot of mornings I stare at my cup and imagine that the steam rising off the surface is greenhouse gas. As someone who makes his living talking about emissions reductions, the imagery is too vivid to ignore; pound for pound, coffee is one of the highest-emitting things I consume.
But then I think about the fact that I think about this at all, and I take another sip. By my second cup, I’m usually at my desk, looking at a newsletter test with Corinne or shooting headlines back and forth with Sara Kiley. They’re often drinking coffee, too.
The carbon in our cups is fuel for our fight against global warming. It powers the hugs I give my daughter when she wakes up. And so in that sense, I like to think the emissions are worth it. And even if they’re not, I need to keep my wife out of jail.
