By Elizabeth McGowan for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
As warnings about escalating climate disasters proliferate, it's tempting to pull the bedcovers up - way high - and stay in the dark.
Aware of that urge to hide, a nimble Charlottesville nonprofit has an antidote for the disheartened. The Community Climate Collaborative, or C3, is inviting Virginians to peek at its early success in weaning local businesses from fossil fuels.
Together, 16 members of the Green Business Alliance pledged last spring to cut their carbon pollution by 45% by the end of 2025. Just a year in, the alliance is upward of halfway there - already achieving a 28% reduction.
Thus far, calculations reveal that members have stopped spewing the equivalent of 4,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which translates to removing 1,000 cars from roadways for a year.
"C3 is tiny, but we're trying to contribute," emphasized Coles Jennings, the nonprofit's director of corporate sustainability. "There's just too much urgency to the problem."
Alarmingly, business operations overlap with more than 65% of Virginia's greenhouse gas footprint via transportation, manufacturing or commercial building energy use, according to Jennings' review of state Department of Environmental Quality inventory numbers.
Jennings doesn't pretend that a relatively puny carbon curtailment in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains will solve the global climate crisis. But, he noted, the alliance's esprit de corps can provide a glimmer of optimism.
That's why C3 aims to widen its regional reach and eventually duplicate its model statewide.
"These businesses are doing something that's really hard," said Jennings, who joined the C3 staff in December. "By taking action, members become a collective business voice for climate. Then they feel more comfortable speaking out.
"That's when they become influencers, pushing for climate measures."
Jennings, a professional engineer, said serving as a sustainability coach for alliance members has been the thrill of his energy consulting career because of their open-mindedness and commitment to progress.
For instance, he pointed to the willingness of InBio to follow through on recommendations suggested by an energy audit. By upgrading its heating and cooling systems, the professional laboratory services company trimmed its gas consumption by 40%.
"That was super validating for me," said Jennings, who conducted the InBio audit as a freelance contractor in 2019. "I know we're not reversing climate change with one company's gas usage, but it was a really cool personal moment."
He also boasted about how The Center at Belvedere, a nonprofit community gathering place for seniors, constructed a new airtight facility that's 2.5 times as large as its old one, with the same carbon footprint.
On the renewable energy front, half of the alliance members have added a total of 640 kilowatts of solar arrays to their properties.
One of Jennings' favorite tales entails Tiger Fuel, a family-owned fuel distribution company that has, perhaps counterintuitively, championed eco-values by announcing it had acquired a solar company at the alliance's May 2021 launch in Charlottesville.
It's an unlikely avenue for a company that distributes heating oil and propane gas and operates a network of gas stations, car washes and convenience stores.
"Lots of companies in their shoes would look at climate action as a threat to their business and actively resist it," Jennings said. "But instead, they're asking how they can get ahead of it."
'Busy as all get-out'
Life has been "busy as all get-out" in the year since Tiger Fuel purchased Charlottesville-based Altenergy and grew to 363 employees. The latter, rebranded as Tiger Solar in February, has offices in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C, Idaho and Michigan.
"We are absolutely happy we did it and also proud," President Gordon Sutton said about branching into solar. "I don't see a lot of people scrambling to do what we've done. It's never been our intent to be a pioneer. It just felt right for us."
C3 first invited Tiger Fuel to the alliance table due to its decades of service in the region and its serious approach to reversing climate change.
As teens, Gordon and his younger brother, Taylor, had pumped gas, checked oil, and cleaned windshields as their father, David, guided the morphing of the company beyond service stations and fuel delivery. The sons both returned to Tiger Fuel after post-college adventures.
Six years ago, Gordon and Taylor, now chief operations officer, figured solar arrays would match Tiger Fuel's ideals when the price of panels and federal tax credits aligned to fit their finances.
By 2018, they hired neighboring Altenergy to install 17.5 kilowatts atop one store and two canopies sheltering gas pumps.
The brothers are in the midst of having Tiger Solar bedeck a mix of car washes, canopies, stores and one bulk facility with at least another 500 kW. Tiger Fuel would do 100% coverage, but not all canopies can support the weight of arrays and the company doesn't own the real estate at all 11 stores.
Gordon Sutton praised C3 for holding Tiger Fuel accountable for slicing its carbon footprint during a hectic year. The nonprofit deserves credit, he said, for strengthening bonds among enterprises that are secure enough to act quickly and ask one another for environmental advice.
For instance, Tiger Solar has completed a pair of solar installations - one 170 kW, the other 111 kW - at two Staunton dealerships owned by fellow alliance member Carter Myers Automotive.
"It's kind of fun to be engaged in an industry where there's so much tailwind," Sutton said about the solar side of his venture. "It feels like every time we do a project, it's received with a lot of fanfare.
"People are paying more attention because, as a company historically engaged in the distribution of fossil fuels, we're a bit of an outlier."
Still, while the laurels are welcome, the darts can sting. Sutton said he's aware some solar competitors have tried to undermine Tiger Fuel's newest venture as a green sheen exercise.
"This is not some sort of hocus-pocus greenwashing thing," Sutton said about the dedication of Tiger Solar's 50 or so employees nationwide. "This is real people doing real stuff in real time."
Altenergy, founded in 2004, had completed 1,700-plus solar projects totaling at least 42 megawatts. Tiger Solar has added 2.8 MW to that figure.
Sutton views that growth as a baby step. He is intent on extending Tiger's Virginia reach and also convincing owners of other competing fuel distributors, gas stations and convenience stores to join his solar fold.
"We are having conversations," he said. "None has yielded big results yet, but I'm confident they will."
Next? An appetite for more
C3 was adamant about crafting a program centered on smaller businesses because those with fewer than 500 employees are the backbone of Virginia's workforce.
The alliance also includes for-profits Red Light Management, WillowTree, Harvest Moon Catering, Quantitative Investment Management and accounting firm Hantzmon Wiebel; clean energy developers Apex Clean Energy, Sigora Solar and Sun Tribe Solar; Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital and nonprofits Legal Aid Justice Center and CFA Institute.
Luring them to become the alliance's "freshman class" began with relationship-building because it's not every day businesses trust a climate organization with their utility bills.
Energy usage metrics mined from those bills guided the individualized "emissions diet" plan for each business. Each participant began with a different baseline so they wouldn't lose credit for pre-alliance improvements.
Jennings is C3's chief data collector and reviewer responsible for providing participants with reports and updates.
"What's really exciting and unique is the community focus and flavor that's missing in the Fortune 500," he said. "We're bringing in a whole range of businesses that otherwise wouldn't touch this stuff because they don't have the staff to do this type of analysis."
Jennings is fully aware some communities become hamstrung on climate action because well-intentioned and well-researched promises never evolve into doable plans. It can be an arduous and exasperating chore.
However, he figures his nonprofit's endeavor will only boost area efforts to curb emissions. Alliance members are crucial players if Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County are to slice planet-warming emissions by 45% (relative to 2011) by 2030.
With such an enthusiastic inaugural membership, Jennings is convinced the project will expand even after the final emissions measurements are released in spring 2026.
"They have such a common thread and an appetite," he said. "My hope is they'll ask 'What's next?' after outgrowing the core mission pledge."
Eventually, he envisions cracking tougher nuts, such as converting fleets to electric vehicles and forming overarching climate action plans that extend beyond carbon footprints.
In the meantime, he wants alliance members to buckle down on energy audits so they can maximize every electron of efficiency instead of leaping immediately to sexier solar.
"I came across this quote somewhere and use it all the time," he said. "'You have to eat your energy efficiency vegetables before you get your solar dessert.'"
Elizabeth McGowan wrote this article for Energy News Network.
get more stories like this via email
By Anne Connor for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
There's not enough coffee in the world. In 2023, the world produced 3 percent less than it consumed. Growing consumer demand in Asia exacerbates the deficit, while climate change affects supply. Coffee is susceptible to heat and drought. It needs predictable conditions to thrive, and conditions now are anything but predictable.
Heat and novel rain patterns harm plants and encourage coffee rust, a devastating fungal disease. Rains may come too early or too late. There may be too much rain or too little. Or all of the above.
Climate change causes labor problems and hurts farm owners, too. Lower yields mean less cash flow, contributing to wage stagnation. Underpaid pickers don’t show up, and coffee cherries rot on the ground, wasting the harvest. Heat can also cause coffee to ripen before pickers are available; again, the cherries fall and are wasted. Some harvests last for six months instead of the standard two, and some are shockingly short.
Climate also intersects with infrastructure. Sometimes, the coffee is picked, but heavy rains wash out the roads, and farmers can’t get their product to market. Or harvests are compressed into a two-week period, and the coffee mills can’t handle the tsunami of cherries waiting to be processed.
With increasingly tight margins, farm owners can’t afford the upgrades needed to make their coffee production more water-efficient, and they can’t buy new cultivars that resist coffee rust and heat.
If smallholder farmers are “deciding between ‘feed my family,’ or ‘renovate the farm,’ they’re going to feed their family,” says Maria Cleaveland, a coffee industry expert and board member of the U.S. chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA). Without hope, people leave—and many of them head for the U.S.
A Shift in Coffee Growing Regions
About 70 percent of global coffee is arabica, favored in the U.S. But climate models show what farmers are already experiencing on the ground: Climate change and arabica are incompatible, at least where coffee is currently grown.
Some 50 percent of current coffee-growing land will likely be unsuitable for arabica by 2050. Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, and Indonesia, four of the biggest coffee nations, are on that list. Growers there are looking for ways to delay the tipping point.
On the plus side, locations further from the equator—the U.S. Gulf Coast, China’s Yunnan province, and parts of Uruguay and Argentina—will likely be coffee-friendly by 2050. Enabled by increasingly favorable weather in Yunnan, coffee production there has soared by nearly 500 percent since 2006.
Coffee plants usually take three to four years to produce their first yield, making the crop a gamble at startup, but rising global demand may provide the incentive. In fact, coffee is increasingly grown in California, says Cleaveland.
Coffee roasters and retailers strategically adjust their sourcing to regional conditions. “We definitely think a lot about that,” says Andi Trindle Mersch, vice president of coffee operations and sustainability at Philz Coffee. “I consider this to be our job as coffee buyers now.” Trindle Mersch says that Philz plans 10 to 15 years ahead in sourcing and is strongly invested in Brazil. Beyond 15 years? “We’re going to keep tasting and trying.”
Could the Answer Come From Trees?
Working in the field at very high temperatures has been exhausting,” says Miriam Monteiro de Aguiar of Brazil’s Cachoeira Farm, which has produced certified organic coffee since 1994. The blazing heat also harms the fragile coffee plants, driving Monteiro de Aguiar back to coffee’s agroforestry roots.
Even considering agroforestry, growing coffee in the shade, is unusual in Brazil. Most farms there still use open-field agriculture—but this approach may not work for much longer in the new climate reality.
“We have been experimenting with shade-grown coffees,” Monteiro de Aguiar says. “More recently, we’ve been fascinated by and experimenting with syntropic agriculture.”
Syntropic agroforestry involves carefully trimming the tree canopy, balancing sun and shade to prevent fungal diseases. As they prune, workers pile leaves and branches on the ground. The biomass retains water and decomposes, enriching the soil. Using fruit trees for shade improves food security for the producers, too.
Although these regenerative models are “vigorous,” as Monteiro de Aguiar says, they are still rare. “Many producers, scientists, and researchers believe and invest more in the scientific development of drought-resistant varieties,” she notes.
Globally, many coffee farmers are moving uphill into forested areas to escape the heat. Coffee was once grown exclusively in the forest, shaded by native trees. Agroforestry reduces the ambient temperature, enriches the soil, and controls evaporation so the plants don’t dry out. It also protects coffee blossoms against frost.
But shade-grown coffee has its own problems. Perhaps most damningly, it increases the incidence and severity of coffee rust by 22 percent, although new techniques like syntropic agroforestry could help. Harvesting shade-grown coffee can be costly and difficult, as workers must contend with roots, branches, machetes, ants, and snakes while reaching for coffee cherries.
Attracted by the higher yields of sun-grown coffee, some conventional farmers clear-cut the hills, a practice that robs the coffee of shade and the land of biodiversity. One study found that arabica’s move into forested areas could result in the loss of 35 percent of threatened vertebrate species, including mammals, birds, and amphibians, due to clear-cutting.
Policy changes could offer new hope for agroforestry. Starting in late 2024, the E.U. will prohibit coffee imports from countries with new deforestation. “It’s in the air; everybody wants to know how this will affect their relationship with their buyers,” says Blanca Castro of Guatemala, executive director of the IWCA.
Some national governments have set policies to encourage shade-grown coffee. This includes Mexico, says Santiago José Arguello Campos, Coordinador General de Agricultura of Mexico. Agroforestry is “very important to preserve biodiversity,” he says. The agriculture department backs up this recommendation with technical assistance. That help is working: 96 percent of the coffee grown in Mexico is now shade-grown. Mexico has nearly 1.5 million acres of shade-grown coffee, much of it bordering protected natural areas.
Coffee worldwide is increasingly grown alongside other crops, such as avocados, plantains, cacao, sugarcane, nuts, citrus, and spices. Castro says this intercropping offers shade for coffee plants and financial stability for farmers.
Some Mexican producers grow coffee under banana trees, for example. The fruit is for farmers to consume themselves, says Arguello Campos, and farmers sell the large banana leaves to the U.S. food market for tamale wraps. This practice can generate up to 30 percent of their total income.
In places that are increasingly too hot or dry to grow coffee, such crops may someday support former coffee producers, but for now, they supplement coffee revenues.
Buying Time
Daniele Giovannucci, a former coffee consultant for the World Bank and founder of the Committee on Sustainability Assessment, sees coffee’s climate adaptation as splitting into two paths. One is specialty coffees, such as shade-grown gourmet varieties. The other, which is easier to scale, is varietals suited to new climate conditions.
Hardier coffee plants could buy time in the coming decades. One possibility is robusta, popular in Europe for espresso and more heat-resistant than arabica. A 2022 study predicted that about 83 percent of the world’s future coffee-growing areas would support robusta, but only 17 percent would support arabica.
Arabica’s ideal temperature range is 64-73 degrees Fahrenheit, with 47 inches of rainfall annually. By contrast, robusta thrives (in some places) at 72-86 degrees Fahrenheit. Notably, a study of robusta’s ideal temperature in Southeast Asia found it to be less heat-tolerant there. Robusta also requires more rainfall, at least 69 inches annually.
David Pohl, founder of Pohl Coffee Consulting and a certified coffee quality rater, says robusta is starting to be recognized as a specialty coffee. To bring out its best flavors, robusta must be processed, roasted, and brewed differently from arabica. Robusta prepared like arabica would not be considered a fine coffee.
Despite robusta’s potential climate advantages, Big Coffee has yet to embrace it fully. Robusta didn’t get its own quality standards until 2010. Pohl was one of the first “R-raters,” experts trained by the Coffee Quality Institute in robusta standards. Before 2010, robusta was judged by the same standards as arabica, which is rated on its “bright notes” and is rewarded for acidity. Robusta is less acidic; a fine robusta is balanced between sweet and salty, for example.
Robusta has vastly greater genetic diversity than arabica; most of its thousands of varieties have yet to be explored. The best robustas Pohl has tasted are from Africa. “They just have more to work with. And so, their coffees tend to be really, really good, whether or not they’re known to the world,” says Pohl.
Hybrid coffee plants are another possible climate solution—for farms that can get them. One hybrid, Centroamericano, introduced in 2010, scores well in “cupping” or taste ratings. It is high-yielding and rust-resistant and thrives in the shade at high altitudes. However, “only a handful” of hybrids “have become commercially available to farmers in the last 15 years, and only in select countries,” according to the nonprofit World Coffee Research.
World Coffee Research has operated a non-GMO breeding program to develop more climate-resistant coffee varieties for the past two years. They use a vast dataset to determine future conditions by country and aim for plants that will thrive in specific regions.
Trindle Mersch says Philz Coffee would be open to robustas or hybrids if the right flavor profiles came along. So far, however, they haven’t tasted one that works for their blends. She notes that Philz supports World Coffee Research. “We’re definitely believers in using science to create quality hybrids and breeds we can work with,” she says.
In 2012, coffee rust hit Mexico and Central America hard, depressing yields through 2015. Mexico’s agriculture department distributed rust-resistant cultivars such as Oro Azteca, Marsellesa, and Costa Rica 95, along with technical assistance on Fair Trade and organic certification. The project also encouraged shade-planting.
Arguello Campos says the three-year project put 200 million plants a year directly into the hands of farmers. The organizers released them in waves, allowing the original plants to yield what they could while the new ones matured.
“The goal was to increase density and resilience,” says Arguello Campos. The Mexican government invested the equivalent of $70 million per year in the project, supplemented by corporate investments and farm labor, in what Arguello Campos describes as a public-private-social venture.
Beanless Coffee
What if these options can’t hold back the impact of climate change? Scientists are exploring sustainable coffee alternatives in laboratories around the world.
A Seattle startup, Atomo Coffee, says it has cracked coffee’s flavor code—without coffee beans. Atomo extracts compounds from ingredients such as ramón seeds, which the ancient Mayans used to make a hot beverage with notes of chocolate and dark-roasted coffee. Atomo also uses date pits that might otherwise end up in landfills; for millennia, date pits have been used to make a coffee-like beverage in the Middle East. The company uses a mass spectrometer to compare its product to coffee at the molecular level.
Atomo founder Andy Kleitsch says the company started its global hunt by analyzing these traditional ingredients and wartime substitutes like chicory and acorns.
“What we found is that these substitutes don’t taste like coffee. And we don’t think consumers are ready to give up conventional coffee to drink a substitute. For us to be successful, we had to create a product that is an exact replica of coffee,” says Kleitsch.
Large coffee companies are concerned about the looming crisis, he says. “They’re all looking to address supply chain problems and quality issues.” Atomo, whose factory starts production in spring 2024, plans to introduce its product as a sideline in existing coffee shops.
In San Francisco, Minus Coffee uses an upcycled approach similar to Atomo’s but with different ingredients, like chicory, millet, and carob. Founder Maricel Saenz, who grew up in Costa Rica, says Minus distributes canned cold brews to large food-service companies. The company donates 1 percent of its profits to a group called Doselva, which equips coffee farmers for intercropping.
And yes, both companies add caffeine—it’s extracted from tea.
Will consumers accept beanless coffee? Kleitsch and Saenz say their products fare well in blind taste tests. Atomo’s backers think there’s a market; they include Horizons Ventures, an early funder of Impossible Foods, and S2G Ventures, an early funder of Beyond Meat.
Trindle Mersch says these alternatives are “just a different product,” like carob versus chocolate. And, she says, “I never moved away from chocolate.”
Beanless coffee can also come from coffee plants.
A research team in Finland released a proof-of-concept study on lab-cultured coffee in late 2023 in hopes that food scientists would find it useful. They used a bioreactor—a container of liquid growth medium—to grow coffee from plant cells, like brewing beer, but without the fermentation.
“The benefit of this technology is that it’s not location-specific; you can run it wherever you want,” says Heiko Rischer, principal scientist and head of plant biotechnology at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He notes that the closed system gives growers control over water purity and nutrients.
Cultured coffee grows fast, in about 10 days, and inexpensively in the lab, and it’s real coffee. It doesn’t look like a coffee bean but is easy to harvest because it’s essentially pre-ground. When the floating mat of coffee cells is drained and dried, it yields a fine powder, ready to roast. Of course, roasting powdered coffee requires a different approach than roasting whole beans, a challenge for this emerging product.
But is lab-cultured coffee good coffee? The research group readily admits that the flavor profile needs some tweaking. Its primary flavor is a smoky burned-sugar aroma with “appropriate bitterness.” Cultured coffee’s flavor can be refined with experimentation, says Sarah O’Connor, a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For example, changing the media in which cells are grown can have a dramatic effect.
David Pohl thinks it’s too soon to take coffee production into the lab. In a doomsday scenario, with farmed coffee no longer viable, he’d be happy to have alternatives. But for right now, “it’s not necessary,” he says. “You have millions of coffee farmers around the world looking for viable ways to produce coffee, and you’ve got a lot of scientists trying to do the right thing.” He adds, “We do have hope for the future.”
Anne Connor wrote this article for Civil Eats.
get more stories like this via email
Contact
