Wrong Again, Grist, Climate Change Is Not Causing Higher Coffee Prices
By
H. Sterling Burnett
August 21, 2025
Grist posted a story blaming climate change for a recent rise in coffee prices. This is false, coffee production and yields have improved amid modest warming. As a result, Grist must seek another cause for higher prices.
In the story, “Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher,” Grist staff writer, Frida Garza, spends 85 percent of her story describing how the tariffs President Donald Trump is imposing on Vietnam will likely affect a recently developed artisanal coffee company, using organically grown Vietnamese Robusta blends, and then generalizing the claims to the impacts on coffee from other growing regions like Brazil. Note, despite climate change leading in the title, so far the story only discusses the potential impacts of tariffs on future coffee prices.
Only the last section of the story deals with climate change, and then only to imply that climate change has caused recent droughts that have affected some coffee growers.
“Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business,” writes Garza. “Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce.”
https://climaterealism.com/2025/08/wrong-again-grist-climate-change-has-nothing-to-do-with-higher-coffee-prices/
