When I heard that coffee futures were reaching record highs, I got a bad case of the jitters. What would happen to my morning cup of Joe? How expensive could it get? Could I afford enough coffee to get me through the day?

I set out on a mission to find out.

Caffeine is the world's most popular drug, and coffee is the second-most-traded commodity after oil. On the futures market, traders buy coffee shipments months or years in advance — so price spikes can indicate what the rest of us might be paying down the road. After the pandemic began, prices for coffee futures rose, along with everything else. Accordingly, the consumer price index showed a steep increase in prices for store-bought coffee throughout 2022.

The problems didn't stop there. Thanks to severe droughts in 2023, major harvests in Brazil and Vietnam did badly, and water in the Panama Canal ran low, slowing ship traffic. Coffee futures started to tick up. Then, this past November, the commodity skyrocketed. Brazil, which exports the lion's share of the industry's preferred arabica beans, was beginning its growing season as the country's worst drought on record stretched into a second year. The clouds that usually shade coffee trees went missing. It would be the second bad harvest in a row. When the news hit, traders rushed to lock in arabica contracts, sending prices to all-time highs in December. Now prices are more than double their 2023 peak. Robusta beans, often used in instant coffee, hit their own record high this month.

Is this the end of coffee as we know it?

Climate experts say the underlying supply problems aren't going anywhere. Over the next two decades, bad harvests could become the norm, wild arabica coffee could move from thriving to endangered, and the land available for coffee cultivation is expected to shrink by half or more. While the coffee market has some flexibility to keep prices down, the long-term outlook for America's favorite beverage is bleak.

Coffee prices have already been going up for a few years. This past summer, brands like Folgers and Maxwell House raised their prices to pass on previous commodity increases to customers. Prices at my local café went up $0.35, so I started grinding my coffee at home. But, the addict that I am, I kept caffeinating. We all did.

This "inelastic demand" gives companies plenty of wiggle room to raise prices without worrying that people will stop buying coffee entirely. Both Folgers' parent company, J.M. Smucker, and Maxwell's parent company, Nestlé, reported higher coffee sales in the US last year despite raising consumer prices. But how much higher could prices get?

People who brew their coffee at home "are going to feel it," Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, said. Since coffee beans are the only ingredient in a tub of Folgers, commodity price increases have a direct impact on grocery prices. Two decades ago, US Department of Agriculture economists looked at how commodity coffee price swings affected grocery shelves. They found that every $0.10 increase in futures led to an immediate $0.02 increase in prices for canisters of ground coffee. When commodity prices stayed high, the rest of the increase was passed on over the course of a year. According to consumer price index data from January, grocery coffee prices are already more than 3% higher than they were this time last year — instant coffee alone rose 7%. And Illy recently told Bloomberg that a 25% hike in prices in the next few months was not out of the question.

To counteract low supply, coffee retailers can fudge the quality: Robusta beans, which have a harsher flavor than arabica, can be mixed into blends, for example. Smucker recently told investors that for Folgers and its other coffee brands, the company had "the ability to flex formulas and still deliver the exact same consumer experience." In Indonesia, coffee shops are even mixing corn and rice with their coffee beans to stretch supplies. Some people have called this phenomenon of companies swapping in cheaper and lower-quality ingredients "flavorflation."

In cafés, Zagorsky said, commodity price swings have a less noticeable impact because most of the cost of a latte is not beans but labor. "If I was Starbucks, I'd worry much more about the unionization drive," he said. Massive companies such as Starbucks can manage the uncertainty around commodity prices by locking in multiyear contracts, playing the market, and hedging their bets. Last year, Starbucks actually came out ahead on coffee futures. The company expects that it has enough beans in storage or contracted to last through at least September. In December, its CEO said it would not raise its North American store menu prices before then — though it is removing some discounts.

Small roasters buy quality beans for more than the commodity price, but unlike Starbucks, they are more sensitive to price swings. Over an Americano (her) and an afternoon decaf (me), Daria Whalen, a coffee buyer for Ritual Coffee in San Francisco, admitted she's worried.

She opened a 12-ounce bag of coffee and poured a handful of beans onto the table. She pointed out slight variations in their size, explaining that these beans came from five different farms in a family co-op that pays coffee pickers Colombia's minimum wage. In an industry rife with shady labor practices, from child labor to human trafficking, buying from farms that pay decent wages is "one of the only things we have left," Whalen said.

This bag retails for $25, more than five times the price of Folgers at Costco. It's not clear how much more consumers would be willing to pay. Thankfully, the more flexible part of that price is the flavor: Coffee beans are rated on a point scale, like wine. To adapt to a temporary price spike, Whalen said, she will choose beans that taste good but fall lower on that scale.

The big question for Whalen is what happens when the climate crisis makes these supply shocks more frequent. "I have anxiety, like probably 85% of the population," Whalen said. "So on some days, you catch me at cup four of coffee and I'm like, 'There's not going to be any coffee anymore.'"

The climate crisis is already changing coffee growing. The past two years have been the hottest on record, bringing more evaporation and making droughts more severe. Coffee harvests have suffered. "In the last year, I saw scorched coffee beans. Coffee beans that were shriveled because of extreme heat," Whalen said. She has also seen warmer temperatures nurture a disease called coffee leaf rust, push back growing seasons, and affect shipping logistics.

A 2022 data synthesis projected double-digit losses over the next few decades in the land that's good for cultivating coffee beans. Some areas will become newly available for coffee, but that won't be nearly enough to balance the losses. Unfortunately for connoisseurs, that new land will likely work best for robusta beans, not arabica beans.

In response to the changes, more growers are drying beans rather than washing them to save on water. That changes flavor profiles, favoring fruity flavors like blueberries, Whalen said: "Sometimes you can get a ferment-y flavor that we would call a defect, but a lot of people really love that."

There's some adapting that farms and supply chains can do, but these efforts may still fall short if countries don't aggressively limit their fossil fuel emissions. One study found that under a business-as-usual scenario, even with best practices in place for coffee growing and logistics, Starbucks could see persistent bean shortages as early as 2029. In its most recent annual report, Starbucks acknowledged that the climate crisis could materially influence its financial performance, particularly if it meant the company couldn't meet demand.

"If you care about your coffee," Regina Rodrigues Rodrigues, a Brazilian climate scientist, said, "you can't support any policies that allow the continued burning of fossil fuels. That's the thing."

Environmental concerns also popped up the last time coffee futures spiked, back in 1977. One environmentalist called the price increase "merely another way of telling us that the 4 billion souls on this planet must compete for a steadily shrinking supply of farm produce." That prediction turned out to be wrong. Since the 1960s, agricultural production has grown every decade. In fact, so much new land has been used for coffee that prices haven't even kept pace with overall inflation — Zagorsky pointed out that, adjusted for inflation, 1 pound of coffee today is still cheaper than 1 pound in 1980.

Looking back, it's tempting to hope that the world is crying wolf, but adaptive measures came with downsides. Agriculture boomed thanks to the clearing of forests and an unprecedented application of fossil fuels, both in fertilizers and as fuel for transporting food along vast global supply chains. One study estimated that most of the growth in agricultural production since the 1970s has not been in line with safe environmental practices. Now, as the world warms, agricultural growth is starting to slow, even as demand for coffee continues to rise. We have not solved our coffee problems; we have merely postponed them.

Is sad, watery 1950s diner coffee our fate? Or will we find new ways to make coffee growing productive and resilient? Zagorsky said that the futures market predicts a price decrease. But beyond that, he doesn't want to make any predictions. "Economists are terrible at guessing the future," he said.

So I took my fears and uncertainty to someone willing to predict the future: Dr. Honeybrew, a coffee fortune teller in Manhattan's East Village. Honeybrew took a look at the coffee dregs in my tiny espresso cup to read the future of coffee itself.

"Everyone is plunging a straw down in the ground and just sucking up all of the richness, all of the life, all of the power from the soil," he said. "This is Mother Nature's way of saying, 'You know what? In return, I'm going to give you guys the shittiest beans.'"

Honeybrew foresaw the sting of change. The chaos of revolution. And a shared love of coffee that, against all odds, could bring Americans back together. Really, he said, coffee's future hinges on the leadership of Melania Trump: "If the Trump family brings to the White House a cocker spaniel," Honeybrew said, "it will be a very good omen."

What Honeybrew didn't speculate on is the future-shaping potential of the Trump administration's recent activity: how new tariffs might increase coffee prices, whether cuts at the National Weather Service could make it harder to predict harvests, and how leaving the Paris agreement could make the underlying problems worse. Without a major course correction, even a cocker spaniel in the Oval Office probably won't save coffee.

Meg Duff is a reporter covering climate change and the environment.