November 15, 2017 • 18 mins
Climate change is already worsening extreme weather events -- from hurricanes to wildfires -- and beginning to affect the U.S. economy and consumers. This episode is the first in a two-part series on climate and commerce. This week, Lindsey and Jenny dive into how changes in the environment are showing up in stores and businesses. Dr. Peter Howard, the economics director at the institute for policy integrity at NYU's school of law, explains how changing global temperatures and climate could have ripple effects on businesses and shoppers. Bloomberg's Jordyn Holman discusses her reporting in Puerto Rico after it was hit by Hurricane Maria and the director of the Florida Department of Citrus describes Hurricane Irma's impact on growers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
I'll go and coverage to Hurricane Harvey this morning. Seventeen
million people arounder hurricane watches and warnings this morning. This
Hurricane Harvey bears down on the Texas coast, serving provoking
an unfolding flooding disaster in America's fourth largest city, Houston, Texas.
People trapped in their flooded out homes. They are fleeing
to their attics, taking to social A lot of people,
I think, who decided to stay in their homes thought
(00:26):
they were going to get lucky. This does not look good. Yeah,
live to ten feet of storm surge above ground level,
some really life threatening surge. It's like the major airports
in Miami, Fort lauderdown West Palm Beach are off shutting down.
And the roar was unbelievable today. It was howling like crazy.
It woke us up in the middle of the night.
In fact, I have to say, this is the worst
storm that we've ever been through. I've never left before.
(00:50):
I might consider even after this one. People estimates nearly
a quarter of the homes here at the Destroyer. Clearly,
flooding was a huge, huge problem across the US this year,
and much of it was caused by tropical storms. As
North Carolinians, Jenny and I know a thing or two
about hurricanes. This year's hurricane season was the third most
(01:12):
active on record, and it won't end until November. Hurricanes Harvey,
Maria and Irma wreaked havoc on Texas, Florida, the Virgin
Islands in Puerto Rico. Our colleague Jordan Holman, who covers
diversity management for Bloomberg, saw the devastation in the Virgin
Islands in Puerto Rico firsthand when she went there to
report right after the disasters occurred. The level of devastation
(01:36):
was very vast. Um trees fallen, houses down. Electricity is
knocked out in both the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico
um so that means schools are closed, businesses weren't really open.
People were bathing in the rivers and didn't really know
when the next mill or clean water was coming from.
So it was this devastation on all parts of the island.
(01:59):
The hole on people who live in impacted areas has
been severe, and scientists predict that superstorms could become the norm.
And it's not just hurricanes, it's droughts, extreme heat, and wildfires.
The likes of which tore through northern California. All these
extreme events could become more common. There's some of the
(02:19):
real impacts of climate change, and they're hurting businesses and
the consumers they serve. I'm Jenny Kaplan and I'm Lindsay rep.
Today on Material World, we're bringing you the first of
two episodes looking at the effective climate change on the
(02:39):
things you buy. First, let's establish the scientific connection between
climate change and the worsening of natural disasters. Here's Bloomberg's
Eric Roston. If you're wondering our intense storms linked to
climate change, the word answer is yes. Here's the reason.
(03:03):
The whole atmosphere is now a joint venture between nature
and humanity. Fossil fuels have brought the world relentless economic growth,
but as a result, there's now more carbon dioxide and
a hundred and fifty more methane in the air than
there was two centuries ago. There's also entirely new heat
trapping gases like h f c s, which ironically are
(03:26):
used for refrigeration. We know these gases are messing up
our long term climate. What's increasingly clear is that they're
also messing with our daily weather. Global warming has put
storms on steroids. The most destructive event of recent years,
Superstorm Sandy, caused at least fifty billion dollars in damage.
It rode assure on an ocean that was warmer and
(03:48):
higher in part because of climate change. Whether the storm
itself would have happened anyway is tough to say, but
it's safe to say that a century from now the
storm would pack an even greater punch. Global warming is
already contributing to about seventy five of extreme heat events
over land and nearly of heavy precipitation events. As scientists
(04:11):
improve their tools, it will better understand these growing dangers
and costs of a climate changed. Puerto Rico fell victim
to two of these storms this summer, Irma and Maria,
and according to Jordan's the human impact was extreme, and
so was the toll on basic commerce. Even the airport
(04:32):
was running a low capacity. The lights weren't on, There
wasn't a taxi line like you expect when you get
to an airport. But when I finally reached my hotel
because of the curfew that the government and stated, I
wasn't able to book a hotel because the workers had
all gone home from the day. Finally I was able
to find a hotel, but there was no electricity there,
(04:54):
there was no running water, there was no WiFi. So
when I would go to a fast food place like
a Burger King, obviously they didn't have all the items
on that menu available to you. So they would have
packaged food that they would sell people, granola bars, just
bottles of water, basically things that you would get from FEMA,
other things that was nonperishable. There would be long lines
(05:16):
for that. Even though you're going into this burger king
you expect a certain type of food, people were just
like looking for whatever food was available to them. Um. Also,
the credit card machines weren't really working, so it was
everyone was paying for things in cash, which is also
a burden because you don't know how much you can
spend because you have a limited amount. So there's long
(05:36):
lines at the grocery store as well. And they would
let the grocery stores I went to, they would let,
you know, maybe ten families in at a time, um
and let them buy maybe fifteen items, but not necessarily
fill up their cart because they knew that there were
still hundreds of people behind them who needed to come
into the grocery store. Economists are already drawing a connection
(05:59):
between climate change and the things we buy. We reached
out to Dr Peter Howard, the economics director at the
Institute for Policy Integrity at n y u s School
of Law. The most common we would think about is
lost property or infrastructure due to flooding and sea level rise.
Oceans are expected to rise as a consequence of melting ice,
(06:20):
and that will inundate areas. And as we have storms
and we have a higher sea level, right, that will
actually make floods worse from storms such as um the
hurricanes that recently hit Houston UM in Puerto Rico. Similarly,
you would expect along those lines that insurance costs prices
will go up for businesses and consumers for two reasons.
(06:42):
One is you have these higher damages that you're expected
to face. But there's another problem, which is that baselines
are actually gonna change, and then we're gonna have more variability,
so it will be harder for insurance companies to sort
of predict what the expected damages that they will get
that they have to make some profit on. So it
might really affect the insurance industry quite a bit. UM
(07:06):
Along those similarnts. I mentioned that there's some evidence that
particularly jobs outside where we're out in the climate. You know,
we're outside doing farm work for instance, UM, that that
will have lost productivity because we're outside and affected by temperatures,
and we might actually just have reduced labor supply as
(07:26):
people are like I don't want to work in very
hot temperatures or just can't you know, there there's limits
to the human body and what we're able to actually accomplish. Similarly,
there's a lot of predictions about lost human life as
well as morbidity, so injuries from UM heat and other
diseases that aren't committed, and that would increase medical costs.
(07:49):
So we should see some sort of increase in medical
expenditure related to climate change. Now, there are some offsetting
effects in that case where you have warmer temperatures during
the winter and we to also has some negative health effects,
so there are some benefits there. Sixteen of the last
seventeen hottest years on record have come since two thousand.
(08:12):
Scientists are in agreement that these extremes are the result
of the rising average temperature of the Earth. Peter Howard
outlined reasons businesses and consumers will likely lose money due
to climate change. It's already happening. Rising temperatures may cost
the world economy two trillion dollars in lost productivity by
(08:33):
as it gets too hot to work in places around
the world. Then there's the higher prices for insurance and healthcare.
Homes and businesses are getting more difficult to ensure because
claims are less predictable. A recent industry study found that
last year there were seven hundred and fifty major loss
events things like earthquakes, storms, and heat waves. That's well
(08:56):
above the ten year annual average of five inde and
according to the World Health Organization, the direct damage costs
to help globally from climate change is estimated to be
between two and four billion dollars per year. By The
most visible example is the lost property due to extreme
(09:17):
events like flooding. One poignant example of this is in
your own refrigerator. Florida's orange juice. Citrus growers were walloped
in the wake of Hurricane Irma. The days after the storm,
where they're standing in their groves with water and with
carpets of fruit that's fallen off the tree. Uh there's
a lot of despair and heartbreak, literally heartbreak. Um, these
(09:42):
these groves and these operations have been in families for generations,
and it's kind of like eating the elephant one bite
at a time. You don't know really where to start,
and you do kind of have to make the decision
about can we do we have the capital to continue
(10:04):
on and how are we going to continue on. That's
Shannon shap the executive director of the Florida Department of Citrus.
Irma was the largest hurricane to form in the Atlantic
and it covered the state of Florida from coast to coast.
There are four hundred and fifty four thousand acres of
(10:26):
Florida citrus in production, and not one of those remained
unscathed after IRMA. Every acre was impacted. So if you
sit back and think about these orange trees and grapefruit
trees that have this almost ready to pick orange or
(10:48):
grapefruit hanging on them, and then imagine Hurricane three force
winds battering them around, they tend to fall off the
tree or the stems break. So eventually that piece of
fruit because the stem is broken, is going to fall
off that tree. Much of the fruit was blown off
of the tree, some of the trees were literally blown
(11:12):
out of the ground, so their roots systems were actually exposed.
And some of the groves were literally underwater. So where
it where it normally would be sandy soils um and
and you know grass paths, you saw literally currents of water. Uh. Obviously,
(11:37):
the availability of Florida citrus, Florida orange juice, fresh Florida grapefruit,
fresh Florida oranges, tangerines will be lower this year. We
expect that we lost more than fifty of the crop
to Hurricane Irma, and private estimates were showing that we
(11:57):
would harvest somewhere between seventy five of an eighty million
boxes of oranges, which we were excited about because that
was actually a boost from last year. Growers will have
taken some time. Let me just say that growers have
had to take a step back, definitely a reality check,
because when you harvest the fruit, that's when you get
(12:18):
paid for everything you put into the grove, and that's
how you continue growing the grove. What it does is
you've got growers that are pausing for a minute trying
to figure out how to put inputs back into that
grove to make sure that there's a crop for next
year and then the year after that. So the impacts
going forward are largely that growers are having to decide
(12:40):
whether to reinvest, see if they have some sort of
crop insurance protection, which is another story, and you know,
seeing if there's any federal relief for disaster recovery for them,
there's going to be less Florida product available, is the
is the bottom line. It's not just orange juice. Harvey
(13:02):
and IRMA wreaked havoc across the American economy, from shutting
down oil and gas refineries to curtailing travel to curbing
sales of sweaters and burritos. The storms caused as much
as a hundred and thirteen point five billion in flood
and wind damage, including up to fifty seven billion for
uninsured homes, said real estate researcher core Logic, Inc. Erma
(13:27):
cost Disney about a hundred million in operating income when
it forced its theme parks to close for two days
and forced the company to cancel or shorten five of
its Disney cruises, and Nordstrom, the upscale department store chain,
said it lost about twenty million in sales from the
hurricanes in Florida alone. Irma also had an impact on
(13:48):
car dealers. Auto Nation, based in Fort Lauderdale, said that
the storm reduced third quarter operating income by about eight
million dollars. None of these businesses explicitly blames climate chain
change for the lost money, but n y US Peter
Howard does see a connection between price changes and climate change.
(14:08):
We're at low levels of climate change where we can
adapt pretty well, but probably the most visible is when
we have these weather extreme events that I can think of.
So in particular goes back to that two thousand seven
two eight food price UH increase that we saw where
extreme weather resulted in um less agriculture agricultural production, which
(14:32):
resulted in increased food prices globally. And but we have
seen that multiple times in multiple situations. I remember in
graduate school, UM I went to UH buy a hard
drive one week to back up my dissertation, and being
a graduate student, I didn't have much money, and so
I waited to buy the hard drive because I looked
at I was like a hundred dollars, that is just
(14:54):
beyond my budget right now. I went back a week
later and it was two d dollars, and I was like,
how did that happen? Turned out that there was flooding
in Thailand and most of the production of hard drives
were in Thailand, so there is impacts the global supply
chain in that sense. We're seeing the impact play out
(15:14):
in Puerto Rico. The Food and Drug Administration said last
month that it's watching the supply for about thirty drugs
made in Puerto Rico in addition to medical devices, and
warned there may be shortages. Products made in Puerto Rico
account for ten percent of all drugs consumed by Americans.
The situation today already looks dire. Businesses are losing money,
(15:37):
consumers are facing shortages and price increases, and people who
live in affected areas like the ones Jordan talked to
in the wake of Maria and Puerto Rico are trying
to figure out what to do next. Small business owners,
they were hoping that UM the customer base would come
back by loyalty, but the larger places like the hotels,
they'd anticipated that less people would come. And we're really
(16:00):
pushing this whole idea that we need tourists to come
to help us rebuild. They needed to do a campaign
to get people to come back UM. In the city
they saw better prospects of um getting their business up
and running, but further out, they definitely accepted that they
would be losing money and business and traffic. When I
(16:24):
would talk to younger people, you know, the millennials, twenty somethings,
they just thought it was in terrible to think that
they would go more than three months without lights. One
guy was saying, I can just go to Florida and Texas,
and I know my lights would be off for seventy
two hours, but then I'll get them back, and there's
more job opportunities. And that's not even a far flight away,
(16:46):
two hours away, and I could have all these opportunities,
and being a US citizen, moving there is very easy.
So a lot of people were considering leaving the island,
like for the long haul. Natural disasters made worse by
climate change or disrupting businesses and having a real impact
(17:08):
on the economy. This is the situation that we're in
right now. It feels bleak, and in our next episode,
we'll take a look forward at the consequences climate change
may have on businesses, industries, and consumers in the future.
Things could get worse or they might get better. Will
explore various possibilities and what companies and consumers are doing
(17:31):
to try to help. That's it for this episode of
Material World. Thanks for listening. For more Material World, check
out Apple Podcasts, Bloomberg, or wherever you get shows like this.
For more reporting from Jordan's follow her on Twitter at
Jordan's Journals. For more of Peter's research, check out n
(17:55):
y use Institute of Policy Integrity website. You can follow
me at Jenny M. Kaplan for more on all the
things you drink and smoke, and more news from Lindsay
at l C Ropps for all things retail. Material World
is produced by Magnus Hendrickson and Liz Smith. Francesca Levy
is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll be back in
(18:17):
two weeks. No
I'll go and coverage to Hurricane Harvey this morning. Seventeen
million people arounder hurricane watches and warnings this morning. This
Hurricane Harvey bears down on the Texas coast, serving provoking
an unfolding flooding disaster in America's fourth largest city, Houston, Texas.
People trapped in their flooded out homes. They are fleeing
to their attics, taking to social A lot of people,
I think, who decided to stay in their homes thought
(00:26):
they were going to get lucky. This does not look good. Yeah,
live to ten feet of storm surge above ground level,
some really life threatening surge. It's like the major airports
in Miami, Fort lauderdown West Palm Beach are off shutting down.
And the roar was unbelievable today. It was howling like crazy.
It woke us up in the middle of the night.
In fact, I have to say, this is the worst
storm that we've ever been through. I've never left before.
(00:50):
I might consider even after this one. People estimates nearly
a quarter of the homes here at the Destroyer. Clearly,
flooding was a huge, huge problem across the US this year,
and much of it was caused by tropical storms. As
North Carolinians, Jenny and I know a thing or two
about hurricanes. This year's hurricane season was the third most
(01:12):
active on record, and it won't end until November. Hurricanes Harvey,
Maria and Irma wreaked havoc on Texas, Florida, the Virgin
Islands in Puerto Rico. Our colleague Jordan Holman, who covers
diversity management for Bloomberg, saw the devastation in the Virgin
Islands in Puerto Rico firsthand when she went there to
report right after the disasters occurred. The level of devastation
(01:36):
was very vast. Um trees fallen, houses down. Electricity is
knocked out in both the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico
um so that means schools are closed, businesses weren't really open.
People were bathing in the rivers and didn't really know
when the next mill or clean water was coming from.
So it was this devastation on all parts of the island.
(01:59):
The hole on people who live in impacted areas has
been severe, and scientists predict that superstorms could become the norm.
And it's not just hurricanes, it's droughts, extreme heat, and wildfires.
The likes of which tore through northern California. All these
extreme events could become more common. There's some of the
(02:19):
real impacts of climate change, and they're hurting businesses and
the consumers they serve. I'm Jenny Kaplan and I'm Lindsay rep.
Today on Material World, we're bringing you the first of
two episodes looking at the effective climate change on the
(02:39):
things you buy. First, let's establish the scientific connection between
climate change and the worsening of natural disasters. Here's Bloomberg's
Eric Roston. If you're wondering our intense storms linked to
climate change, the word answer is yes. Here's the reason.
(03:03):
The whole atmosphere is now a joint venture between nature
and humanity. Fossil fuels have brought the world relentless economic growth,
but as a result, there's now more carbon dioxide and
a hundred and fifty more methane in the air than
there was two centuries ago. There's also entirely new heat
trapping gases like h f c s, which ironically are
(03:26):
used for refrigeration. We know these gases are messing up
our long term climate. What's increasingly clear is that they're
also messing with our daily weather. Global warming has put
storms on steroids. The most destructive event of recent years,
Superstorm Sandy, caused at least fifty billion dollars in damage.
It rode assure on an ocean that was warmer and
(03:48):
higher in part because of climate change. Whether the storm
itself would have happened anyway is tough to say, but
it's safe to say that a century from now the
storm would pack an even greater punch. Global warming is
already contributing to about seventy five of extreme heat events
over land and nearly of heavy precipitation events. As scientists
(04:11):
improve their tools, it will better understand these growing dangers
and costs of a climate changed. Puerto Rico fell victim
to two of these storms this summer, Irma and Maria,
and according to Jordan's the human impact was extreme, and
so was the toll on basic commerce. Even the airport
(04:32):
was running a low capacity. The lights weren't on, There
wasn't a taxi line like you expect when you get
to an airport. But when I finally reached my hotel
because of the curfew that the government and stated, I
wasn't able to book a hotel because the workers had
all gone home from the day. Finally I was able
to find a hotel, but there was no electricity there,
(04:54):
there was no running water, there was no WiFi. So
when I would go to a fast food place like
a Burger King, obviously they didn't have all the items
on that menu available to you. So they would have
packaged food that they would sell people, granola bars, just
bottles of water, basically things that you would get from FEMA,
other things that was nonperishable. There would be long lines
(05:16):
for that. Even though you're going into this burger king
you expect a certain type of food, people were just
like looking for whatever food was available to them. Um. Also,
the credit card machines weren't really working, so it was
everyone was paying for things in cash, which is also
a burden because you don't know how much you can
spend because you have a limited amount. So there's long
(05:36):
lines at the grocery store as well. And they would
let the grocery stores I went to, they would let,
you know, maybe ten families in at a time, um
and let them buy maybe fifteen items, but not necessarily
fill up their cart because they knew that there were
still hundreds of people behind them who needed to come
into the grocery store. Economists are already drawing a connection
(05:59):
between climate change and the things we buy. We reached
out to Dr Peter Howard, the economics director at the
Institute for Policy Integrity at n y u s School
of Law. The most common we would think about is
lost property or infrastructure due to flooding and sea level rise.
Oceans are expected to rise as a consequence of melting ice,
(06:20):
and that will inundate areas. And as we have storms
and we have a higher sea level, right, that will
actually make floods worse from storms such as um the
hurricanes that recently hit Houston UM in Puerto Rico. Similarly,
you would expect along those lines that insurance costs prices
will go up for businesses and consumers for two reasons.
(06:42):
One is you have these higher damages that you're expected
to face. But there's another problem, which is that baselines
are actually gonna change, and then we're gonna have more variability,
so it will be harder for insurance companies to sort
of predict what the expected damages that they will get
that they have to make some profit on. So it
might really affect the insurance industry quite a bit. UM
(07:06):
Along those similarnts. I mentioned that there's some evidence that
particularly jobs outside where we're out in the climate. You know,
we're outside doing farm work for instance, UM, that that
will have lost productivity because we're outside and affected by temperatures,
and we might actually just have reduced labor supply as
(07:26):
people are like I don't want to work in very
hot temperatures or just can't you know, there there's limits
to the human body and what we're able to actually accomplish. Similarly,
there's a lot of predictions about lost human life as
well as morbidity, so injuries from UM heat and other
diseases that aren't committed, and that would increase medical costs.
(07:49):
So we should see some sort of increase in medical
expenditure related to climate change. Now, there are some offsetting
effects in that case where you have warmer temperatures during
the winter and we to also has some negative health effects,
so there are some benefits there. Sixteen of the last
seventeen hottest years on record have come since two thousand.
(08:12):
Scientists are in agreement that these extremes are the result
of the rising average temperature of the Earth. Peter Howard
outlined reasons businesses and consumers will likely lose money due
to climate change. It's already happening. Rising temperatures may cost
the world economy two trillion dollars in lost productivity by
(08:33):
as it gets too hot to work in places around
the world. Then there's the higher prices for insurance and healthcare.
Homes and businesses are getting more difficult to ensure because
claims are less predictable. A recent industry study found that
last year there were seven hundred and fifty major loss
events things like earthquakes, storms, and heat waves. That's well
(08:56):
above the ten year annual average of five inde and
according to the World Health Organization, the direct damage costs
to help globally from climate change is estimated to be
between two and four billion dollars per year. By The
most visible example is the lost property due to extreme
(09:17):
events like flooding. One poignant example of this is in
your own refrigerator. Florida's orange juice. Citrus growers were walloped
in the wake of Hurricane Irma. The days after the storm,
where they're standing in their groves with water and with
carpets of fruit that's fallen off the tree. Uh there's
a lot of despair and heartbreak, literally heartbreak. Um, these
(09:42):
these groves and these operations have been in families for generations,
and it's kind of like eating the elephant one bite
at a time. You don't know really where to start,
and you do kind of have to make the decision
about can we do we have the capital to continue
(10:04):
on and how are we going to continue on. That's
Shannon shap the executive director of the Florida Department of Citrus.
Irma was the largest hurricane to form in the Atlantic
and it covered the state of Florida from coast to coast.
There are four hundred and fifty four thousand acres of
(10:26):
Florida citrus in production, and not one of those remained
unscathed after IRMA. Every acre was impacted. So if you
sit back and think about these orange trees and grapefruit
trees that have this almost ready to pick orange or
(10:48):
grapefruit hanging on them, and then imagine Hurricane three force
winds battering them around, they tend to fall off the
tree or the stems break. So eventually that piece of
fruit because the stem is broken, is going to fall
off that tree. Much of the fruit was blown off
of the tree, some of the trees were literally blown
(11:12):
out of the ground, so their roots systems were actually exposed.
And some of the groves were literally underwater. So where
it where it normally would be sandy soils um and
and you know grass paths, you saw literally currents of water. Uh. Obviously,
(11:37):
the availability of Florida citrus, Florida orange juice, fresh Florida grapefruit,
fresh Florida oranges, tangerines will be lower this year. We
expect that we lost more than fifty of the crop
to Hurricane Irma, and private estimates were showing that we
(11:57):
would harvest somewhere between seventy five of an eighty million
boxes of oranges, which we were excited about because that
was actually a boost from last year. Growers will have
taken some time. Let me just say that growers have
had to take a step back, definitely a reality check,
because when you harvest the fruit, that's when you get
(12:18):
paid for everything you put into the grove, and that's
how you continue growing the grove. What it does is
you've got growers that are pausing for a minute trying
to figure out how to put inputs back into that
grove to make sure that there's a crop for next
year and then the year after that. So the impacts
going forward are largely that growers are having to decide
(12:40):
whether to reinvest, see if they have some sort of
crop insurance protection, which is another story, and you know,
seeing if there's any federal relief for disaster recovery for them,
there's going to be less Florida product available, is the
is the bottom line. It's not just orange juice. Harvey
(13:02):
and IRMA wreaked havoc across the American economy, from shutting
down oil and gas refineries to curtailing travel to curbing
sales of sweaters and burritos. The storms caused as much
as a hundred and thirteen point five billion in flood
and wind damage, including up to fifty seven billion for
uninsured homes, said real estate researcher core Logic, Inc. Erma
(13:27):
cost Disney about a hundred million in operating income when
it forced its theme parks to close for two days
and forced the company to cancel or shorten five of
its Disney cruises, and Nordstrom, the upscale department store chain,
said it lost about twenty million in sales from the
hurricanes in Florida alone. Irma also had an impact on
(13:48):
car dealers. Auto Nation, based in Fort Lauderdale, said that
the storm reduced third quarter operating income by about eight
million dollars. None of these businesses explicitly blames climate chain
change for the lost money, but n y US Peter
Howard does see a connection between price changes and climate change.
(14:08):
We're at low levels of climate change where we can
adapt pretty well, but probably the most visible is when
we have these weather extreme events that I can think of.
So in particular goes back to that two thousand seven
two eight food price UH increase that we saw where
extreme weather resulted in um less agriculture agricultural production, which
(14:32):
resulted in increased food prices globally. And but we have
seen that multiple times in multiple situations. I remember in
graduate school, UM I went to UH buy a hard
drive one week to back up my dissertation, and being
a graduate student, I didn't have much money, and so
I waited to buy the hard drive because I looked
at I was like a hundred dollars, that is just
(14:54):
beyond my budget right now. I went back a week
later and it was two d dollars, and I was like,
how did that happen? Turned out that there was flooding
in Thailand and most of the production of hard drives
were in Thailand, so there is impacts the global supply
chain in that sense. We're seeing the impact play out
(15:14):
in Puerto Rico. The Food and Drug Administration said last
month that it's watching the supply for about thirty drugs
made in Puerto Rico in addition to medical devices, and
warned there may be shortages. Products made in Puerto Rico
account for ten percent of all drugs consumed by Americans.
The situation today already looks dire. Businesses are losing money,
(15:37):
consumers are facing shortages and price increases, and people who
live in affected areas like the ones Jordan talked to
in the wake of Maria and Puerto Rico are trying
to figure out what to do next. Small business owners,
they were hoping that UM the customer base would come
back by loyalty, but the larger places like the hotels,
they'd anticipated that less people would come. And we're really
(16:00):
pushing this whole idea that we need tourists to come
to help us rebuild. They needed to do a campaign
to get people to come back UM. In the city
they saw better prospects of um getting their business up
and running, but further out, they definitely accepted that they
would be losing money and business and traffic. When I
(16:24):
would talk to younger people, you know, the millennials, twenty somethings,
they just thought it was in terrible to think that
they would go more than three months without lights. One
guy was saying, I can just go to Florida and Texas,
and I know my lights would be off for seventy
two hours, but then I'll get them back, and there's
more job opportunities. And that's not even a far flight away,
(16:46):
two hours away, and I could have all these opportunities,
and being a US citizen, moving there is very easy.
So a lot of people were considering leaving the island,
like for the long haul. Natural disasters made worse by
climate change or disrupting businesses and having a real impact
(17:08):
on the economy. This is the situation that we're in
right now. It feels bleak, and in our next episode,
we'll take a look forward at the consequences climate change
may have on businesses, industries, and consumers in the future.
Things could get worse or they might get better. Will
explore various possibilities and what companies and consumers are doing
(17:31):
to try to help. That's it for this episode of
Material World. Thanks for listening. For more Material World, check
out Apple Podcasts, Bloomberg, or wherever you get shows like this.
For more reporting from Jordan's follow her on Twitter at
Jordan's Journals. For more of Peter's research, check out n
(17:55):
y use Institute of Policy Integrity website. You can follow
me at Jenny M. Kaplan for more on all the
things you drink and smoke, and more news from Lindsay
at l C Ropps for all things retail. Material World
is produced by Magnus Hendrickson and Liz Smith. Francesca Levy
is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll be back in
(18:17):
two weeks. No
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