It’s spooky season, and you know that means candy. Chocolate bars, lollies, gummies, gumballs, and more choco- wait what if we didn’t have this creamy, rich, and sweet desert anymore? USA Today, BBC Newsround and many other news sites have warned of a choco-pocalypse. WSPA 7News and Bloomberg have reported a chocolate shortage and “genetically engineering cacao plants to better survive a harsher and warmer climate.”
Climate change is the reason the world is having a chocolate shortage. The rising climate comes from pollution from cars, factories, and wildfires. And while change is possible, these are essential for modern society.
With this kind of climate changes, the thin strip of rain-forests that are home to the cacao plants are dying.
Huge companies, such as M&M and Hershey’s that profit on chocolate are going out of business while the demands for chocolate go up, leaving scientists to figure out a way to make artificial chocolate or save the natural resource.
“I mean you need [chocolate] for most things, if you wanted chocolate cake you’re gonna need chocolate or chocolate chips you’re gonna need chocolate, it’s essential for cooking, especially baking,” said junior John Lux.

“Rising temperatures from climate change threaten to shrink the slim strip of rain-forests around the equator where the cacao trees used to make chocolate thrive,” according to a 2016 review from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
It’s not just chocolate that might be gone. The seven billion people that inhabit planet Earth also drain nearly all of her natural resources.
The Guardian News lists six natural resources that are going to be gone by 2050 are water, oil, natural gas, phosphorus, coal, and rare earth elements, like lithium and erbium.
“Maybe we’ll end up in a dystopian future and the world would go so far that the major cities would collapse,” Sophomore Jonas Painter said. “And we just keep going the way we are with chaos.”
“They talked about pollution being bad in the seventies. I mean, why do we still have such bad pollution? It’s 2018 now and that was decades ago and yet here we are. Everything is dying because it’s too hot and gross,” said Lux.
“Preserve [the natural resources] and don’t take it for granted. I mean we go through a lot in our daily lives I feel like if we just reserve them and think about the consequences. Like throwing away a piece of homework,” said Painter.