Climate Change Is Coming for Your Favorite Holiday Foods |
Chocolate, vanilla, coffee, cinnamon: The ingredients for your favorite holiday foods are becoming increasingly harder to grow because of climate change.
For example, cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, which has been facing more days of extreme heat and drought, according to a recent report from the Weather Channel. “The crop doesn’t like it,” meteorologist Jennifer Gray explained.
And when cocoa production falls, consumers also feel the heat: Prices for chocolate have shot up over the last year and were four times as high at the end of 2024 as they were in 2022.
Vanilla and cinnamon, key ingredients for holiday baking that are largely grown in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, are also under threat. “Because we rely on just a handful of islands to produce basically our world’s cinnamon, it is extremely vulnerable. These are also places that are facing climate extremes,” Gray said.
And for something like coffee, climate change is drastically shrinking the land where it can grow. Suitable locations could decrease by 50 percent by 2050, according to a 2014 study. Plus, the Trump administration’s on-again-off-again tariffs have shocked the coffee market, one that’s already reeling from landslides and floods in Vietnam.
That festive mocha latte looks like it’ll be getting a lot more expensive. Luckily, we’ll have a lot more heat waves, fires, and floods to deal with to distract us.
To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, President Donald Trump is commemorating the most important person in the country’s history: himself.
Back in 2021—days after the January 6 riots—Trump signed an act to authorize the creation of new coins to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. The act specified that one coin be focused on women’s contribution to U.S. history.
In response, a bipartisan committee came up with some recommendations: a coin featuring Frederick Douglass to represent abolition, one with a “Votes for Women” flag to honor women’s suffrage, and a coin featuring 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, who helped desegregate her school in 1960.
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has ultimate say, did not follow these recommendations, reported The New York Times.
Instead, the new coins will feature a Pilgrim couple on the Mayflower, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln. (The Trump administration, apparently, was not satisfied with the already significant coin representation of three out of four of these historic American men.)
And then, the collection’s pièce de résistance: a Trump dollar coin, featuring the president’s likeness on both sides.
It’s worth pointing out that it is incredibly abnormal—and some would argue, anti-American—to have a sitting president on a coin. Washington refused to have his likeness on a coin while he was president, as it felt too king-like for the leader of the newly free United States, according to the Times. Trump, apparently, has no such qualms.
After a deadly shooting at Brown University which left two people dead and injured nine others, people across the country struggled Sunday to make sense of the event and the needless loss of life.
But while Americans tend to agree that mass shootings such as this one are a tragedy, much of the GOP, predictably, continues to engage in magical thinking—by pretending gun violence is not at all connected to being able to easily procure guns.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy pointed out during an interview on CNN on Sunday that the president himself was making the problem much, much worse.
“Over the last year, President Trump has been engaged in a dizzying campaign to increase violence in this country,” Murphy said. “He is restoring gun rights to felons and people who have lost their ability to buy guns, he eliminated the White House office of gun violence protection, and he has stopped funding mental health grants and community anti–gun violence grants that Republicans and Democrats supported... He’s been engaged in a pretty deliberate campaign to try to make violence more likely in this country, and I think you’re unfortunately going to see the results of that on the streets of America.”
“That’s a pretty big statement. He’s in a campaign to make violence more likely?” the CNN anchor said.
“Of course,” Murphy said. Later, he continued: “The evidence tells you that when you stop funding mental health, you stop funding community anti–gun violence programs, when you give gun rights back to dangerous people, you’re going to have an increase in violence, that is knowable........