Save the Ales: How Global Warming Could Ruin Beer

15 years ago, in a desperate plea to get Americans to think globally and drink locally (and think global and act loco), my crack team of interns wrote the following in pamphlets circulated to party goers across the country:

"From deforestation to dying coral reefs, global warming is destroying the earth. But what’s the scariest is that global warming could lead to the destruction of one of America’s most treasured natural resources… BEER."

This was rooted in three scientific facts about the American hops industry, located in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho:

• The USDA argued that one major threat to hops was the collapse of the trellises on which they grow. This is caused by increased precipitation, something that the Northwest will experience due to global warming;
• The USDA argued that hops struggle to survive in extreme heat, another periodic impact from global warming in the region; and
• The U.S. EPA argued that every three degrees the temperature rises will force ecosystems to shift about 200 miles from the equator, in this case North towards Canada.

What scared me was not all of our hops dying. This seemed like the best case scenario. In fact, it was unlikely that many fragmented ecosystems from our national parks to hops crops could shift 200 or more miles with the climate when WalMart and the sprawl that it represented cut up America's landscapes, blocking America's ecosystems from shifting. What scared me was that Canada might get our hops, using them in Labatts or some other insult to Northwestern beer.

People agreed. Hundreds of parties were thrown across the country, educating people about the impacts of global warming and what could be done.  People acted locally, pushing for clean energy in their communities. And they acted globally, pushing for Citigroup and other banks to offer cheap clean energy financing for consumers.

This month, NOAA released a study affirming that what we argued in 2001 is happening today, stating:

"The U.S. is the second largest hops-producing country in the world. But almost all of the nation’s commercial hopyards are located in just three states: Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Washington alone produces nearly three-quarters of all the nation’s hops. In 2015, an estimated 71 percent of U.S. hops were grown in Washington, 15 percent in Oregon and 11 percent in Idaho, according to data from Hop Growers of America...

2015 shattered global temperature records, and Washington, in particular, experienced record hot and dry conditions. In May, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee declared a drought emergency after state officials recorded the lowest snowpack ever for the state. Washington also had a brutal wildfire season in 2015 with the massive Okanogan Complex surpassing last year’s record-setting Carlton Complex to become the largest fire in the state’s history.

The 2015 National Hop Report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that growers suffered crop loss in some varieties, such as Willamette and Centennial, which don’t hold up well in extreme heat."

What’s NOAA didn't tell us, and what most Americans don’t realize, is that there's more to do than Save the Ales. We need to Save the Cocktails.

In 2001, we joked that in a changing climate, Sex on the Beach will be a thing of the past due to rising water levels that erode beaches and swallow small islands. We joked that Icebergs will become scarce since forty percent of arctic sea ice had already melted at that point.

Now we know that regardless of what we do, the U.S. could see 6-10 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century because our pollution has set in motion the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Madelyn Albright said there is a special place in hell for women who don't support Hillary Clinton. I think that special place in hell is for the oil, coal, and natural gas industry leaders and every politician who's blocked action or failed to act.

We warned in a light hearted way that hurricanes would be mixed much stronger from warming sea waters. As reality set in from Katrina and Sandy, this was no joke any more.

NOAA is finally releasing science on this when the impact is happening now -- global warming is hurting agriculture in the United States and around the world right now. But the science has been there for anyone to see for decades. 

If Save the Ales teaches us anything, it's that the predictions we made on climate change are happening faster than we thought, and it's finally being covered well by the press well when the impacts are happening, not when we could have warned people about it.

But the other thing it teaches us, and the only real lesson to be gleaned from the Paris Agreement, is that thinking globally and organizing locally to change the energy mix of our countries, is the only way things have and will continue to change.