Climate Conversations Podcast: Coffee or tea - Which comes with a bigger splash of climate guilt?

The debate between coffee and tea is as old as time. For centuries, fans around the world have quarrelled over their health benefits, caffeine content and popularity.

But this week, Jack Board and Liling Tan serve up a different kind of argument – on the carbon footprint each beverage leaves behind.      

Jump to these key moments:

• 2:12 When fertile land becomes arid
• 6:19 Battle of beverages: Coffee or Tea?
• 11:45 Fungal pathogens creeping into tea crops
• 16:44 Packaging, milk and transportation all add up
   

Here's an excerpt of the conversation:

Jack Board:
There's no doubt that tea production, especially in tropical countries, is implicated in lots of deforestation. It is causing pollution. It is leading to impacts on biodiversity. It's also highly vulnerable to climate change, so changing weather patterns means all of the processes for producing tea are under threat, from the plucking to the pruning and then how chemicals are being used in the process.

Probably something we don't think about much if you're having tea, is that you're also probably consuming chemicals.  

Liling Tan: That goes for coffee too!

Jack: Yes, yes, your turn in a minute. What we're seeing as well is that global warming is leading to more diseases like these fungal pathogens, which is definitely giving me “Last of Us” vibes. So farmers need to use more fungicides to combat that and pesticides to keep their crops healthy, which isn't ideal or sustainable or good for us. 

Overall, drinking tea is not a carbon free exercise at all. It's about 20g of carbon in leaf form, and then you put it in a tea bag, you multiply that impact by 10 times. You add some milk, boil a bit too much water, put in some sugar, or maybe you're out for an iced tea in a plastic cup with a thick plastic straw.

Liling: It’s not like you're drinking coffee from a pitcher plant. You're also using plastic, right?  Let's go back to that 34 litres of water that it takes to produce tea. How about try 140 litres for coffee for one cup? I mean, that's four times as many! It's a lot. And the emissions are higher too. Jack, you're a latte drinker, right? Cow's milk? That's more than 10 times in terms of carbon footprint.