Coffee Is High Carbon & Bad For Climate Change

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Many years ago in a PBS special, Dr. Nicolas Perricone, MD mentioned that drinking coffee can elevate the stress hormone cortisol. He said cortisol is necessary, but it is not meant to stay in a person’s body for hours at an elevated level. If it is kept at a high level in the body the presence of cortisol can have some toxic effects: it can be harmful to brain cells, cause the retention of belly fat, make bones weak through decalcification, be detrimental to muscle tissue, depress immune function and damage collagen, a protein in skin, muscles, and bones, etc. (Elevated cortisol may also disrupt sleep.)

After writing about some of the worst climate change foods: beef, dairy products, lamb and mutton, farmed shrimp, and pork, I wondered if coffee is considered to be high carbon as well. The answer is yes. But if information about the carbon output or carbon equivalent was presented here not many people may understand it. So, here is a more familiar comparison. “In other words, if you drink one cup of black coffee each morning, you’ve contributed 94 kg CO₂e in a year — equivalent to the CO₂ from burning 11 gallons of gasoline.”

Of course, some people drink far more than one cup of coffee a day. Recently, I overheard an older lady claiming to drink four pots of coffee per day, not four cups. She was probably exaggerating, because 4 pots could be about 48 cups. Let’s say she had 8 cups per day and that might be about the equivalent of roughly 88 gallons of gasoline per year. In ten years, it would be about 880 gallons of gasoline burned.

Apparently, most of the coffee climate change emissions come from land use change and deforestation, fertilizer use, and processing methods. 

You might not think that many trees and forests were cut down for coffee, but it’s a huge amount: “Nearly 2 Mha of forest were replaced by coffee plantations between 2001 and 2015, of which 1.1 Mha were for robusta coffee and 0.8 Mha were for arabica coffee.28 Forest replacement by robusta coffee was most prevalent in Indonesia (33 percent of the global total), followed by Brazil (16 percent), Madagascar (14 percent), and Vietnam (12 percent). Forest replacement by arabica coffee was most prevalent in Brazil (36 percent), Peru (20 percent), and Colombia (8 percent).” That means nearly two million hectares or approaching five million acres of forested land was destroyed to grow coffee beans. The total number of acres used for coffee production may be 27 million.

Sometimes we humans get focused on a single idea and lose sight of the context or other factors. Coffee is not only bad for climate change, it also results in the overuse of chemicals that can be harmful to human health and the environment. “In Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer and pesticide consumer, chemical pesticide use increased by 190% in a single decade. Estimates show that roughly 38 million kilograms of pesticides are used annually in Brazilian coffee production. And since 2019, 475 new pesticides have been approved in Brazil. More than a third of these are not approved in the EU due to their toxicity.”

From the same source: “The problem is that there are more and more reports of pesticide contamination in groundwater and ecosystems, and harmful symptoms and disorders among animals and humans in areas where coffee is grown—from skin disorders, respiratory problems, to high blood pressure, organ damage, cancer and cardiovascular disease. All of this seems to be linked to the use of pesticides in coffee production.”

From the human health perspective, the news is worse for coffee drinkers because coffee also contains acrylamide, which has a potential link to cancer. The risk may be very low and yet there is a bit of confusion over coffee drinking and acrylamide exposure because acrylamide is not only in coffee. It is also in various common foods such as french fries, potatoes, various baked goods, microwave popcorn, etc. For some people, it’s common to have a muffin or doughnut made from wheat flour with a cup of coffee and they might do so every morning. Both likely contain acrylamide.

Returning to the climate change impacts for a moment, there is an idea that replacing dairy milk and/or dairy cream in coffee beverages is better because dairy products are one of the top contributors to climate change. So, yes, try non-dairy milk such as oat, almond, or soy. However, the best solution is not making something very harmful a little less harmful, it would be simply to stop doing the harm. The best solution is to stop drinking coffee — it will be better for the planet, may improve a person’s health, and will save some money.