Climate change is messing with cocktail hour
by Auden Schendler.
Come Friday, I’m usually pretty
torched after a typical week of being attacked as a hypocrite for working on
climate change in the ski industry. So, often, I’ll
join our company CFO for a cocktail. Our favorite is a Manhattan, which I mix
up with some Gentleman Jack if possible, because I like owner Brown-Forman’s work on climate change. And, in theory, I escape. Or so I thought.
But it turns out that global warming
may affect weather patterns crucial to the bourbon aging process,
according to a terror-inducing study conducted for
the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Hey, now. Come on. Things are
getting a little personal now.
For years, we’ve been hearing that
climate change will lead to increased drought, fire, superstorms, floods,
threats to oceans and fisheries, and disruptions to food and water supplies.
But that’s just standard apocalypse. Now climate change is messing with
cocktail hour, and that’s not cool.
Maybe alcohol will be the final
straw that galvanizes people into action. Just this week alone, two articles brought
up the booze-climate connection, both written — not surprisingly, given the
climate-activist worldview — by friends who have been known to enjoy the
occasional highball. On Huffington Post, snowboarder Jeremy Jones talks about
his climate nonprofit Protect Our Winters’ new collaboration with Alamos vineyards. (Alamos depends on Andes snowmelt to irrigate their grapes.)
And Jenn Orgolini from New Belgium Brewery pointed out in the Coloradoan that drought and flooding threaten the brewery’s (and many
Broncos fans’) very lifeblood: hops and barley.
When many of us got into the field
of solving climate change years ago, conventional wisdom was that a few industries
would be extremely concerned about climate out front. Those included insurance
(Swiss Re and other reinsurance giants have had climate divisions for years,
correctly anticipating a spike in weather-related disasters), banking, agriculture, and skiing. But now a whole host of
other industries are worried, many of which cut to the heart of who we are, of our
history and tradition and ritual.
Take tea, for example, a key part of
life in many parts of the world. It’s under the gun from climate as well.
Coffee too. A few weeks ago, Jim
Hanna at Starbucks talked about climate impacts on coffee and his remarks got
covered everywhere, from Newsweek to The Washington
Post to Fox News. This surprised Jim a little bit, but of course his
comments went viral: To drink coffee is to be a human being. (I’m such a coffee
addict that I used to carry a glass press pot into the wilderness for three-week
trips when I worked for Outward Bound.)
You can Google almost any business
and find concerns about climate change associated with it. No surprise. But we
humans are funny. Some things are too big for us to understand, let alone think
we can fix (climate, democracy). Some things get our attention because they are
small and personal and in our faces. Things like children. And whiskey.
Related Links:
California study is NOT about technological limits. Why glass is 100% full
IEA’s bombshell warning: Act now or climate change is here to stay
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