Scorching weather across the globe makes fields too dry for crops, rivers too warm to cool power plants, and leaves wind turbines idle – and it’s pushing commodities prices higher
Ron Harkey, the president and chief executive officer of the world’s largest cotton warehouse in Lubbock, expects to get 1.5 million bales from members of a growers cooperative in the area this year. That’s down from 2.5 million last season. Tighter supplies have helped drive cotton traded in New York up more than 10 percent this year.Excerpt:
Commodity producers are having a summer to remember, for all the wrong reasons. A heatwave across swathes of North America, Europe and Asia, coupled with a worsening drought in some areas, is causing spikes in the prices of anything from wheat to electricity. Cotton plants are stunted in parched Texas fields, French rivers are too warm to effectively cool nuclear reactors and the Russian wheat crop is faltering. The scorching heat is extracting a heavy human cost – contributing to floods in Japan and Laos and wildfires near Athens. Relief from soaring temperatures, which topped 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic Circle, may not arrive for at least two weeks. It’s a timely reminder of the vulnerability of global commodity markets to the changing climate, as human activity disrupts the behavior of plants, animals and the march of the seasons.
These charts explain visually how the heat waves across the globe are going to be affecting all of us or some of us, but enough to know that the climate changes, we pay......
The heat and lack of rainfall is pummeling crops across Europe as far as the Black Sea. Output in Russia, the world’s top wheat exporter, is set to fall for the first time in six years, while concerns continue to mount about smaller crops in key growers such as France and Germany. Wheat futures for December have jumped almost 10 percent in the past month in Paris, with prices this week reaching the highest since the contract started trading in 2015.
French farmers aren’t the only ones finding the weather too hot to handle. The country’s fleet of nuclear power plants is also suffering. Rivers have become too warm to effectively cool the reactors, and Electricite de France SA may be forced to cut output later this week at two stations. The hot weather also has forced a German coal-fired plant to curb operations and reduced the availability of some plants in Britain fired by natural gas. France gets more than 70 percent of its power from 58 atomic stations and is a net exporter of electricity to neighboring countries. Any reductions in output would potentially boost prices across the continent. The sultry conditions are also leaving wind turbines virtually at a standstill. In Germany, wind output over the past 10 days has been a third lower than the average for the year so far. Windmills are also becalmed in Spain, Italy, the U.K., Denmark and Sweden.
This one speaks for itself.
Ron Harkey, the president and chief executive officer of the world’s largest cotton warehouse in Lubbock, expects to get 1.5 million bales from members of a growers cooperative in the area this year. That’s down from 2.5 million last season. Tighter supplies have helped drive cotton traded in New York up more than 10 percent this year.
