The Canada Goose Puffer and the Climate
By Safina Center Writer-in-Residence Paul Greenberg
Note to “Explorers”: You’re in Denial
You know the coat I’m talking about.
The expensive one. The one with the Arctic Ocean logo that pops. The one that gets stolen at gun point and from a distance looks like armor. The one for which Drake was asked to do a design tweak, drawing in rappers and hip-hop artists like lemmings. The one Daniels Radcliffe and Craig, and all of China seem to wear.
At over a thousand dollars, the full monty Canada Goose puffer is a serious investment that I find hard to fathom. My entire wardrobe, cashed in, would barely amount to two puffers (if I’m honest it probably wouldn’t amount to one). That doesn’t bother me. I’m pretty sure I could match the coat’s insulating powers by adding a fifty-dollar layer of thermals under the cut-rate puffer I occasionally deploy.
No, the unfathomable part, the bothersome part of the thousand-dollar-puffer isn’t the thousand-dollar part. What’s troubling is that the Canada Goose Puffer only gets more valuable and desired the warmer our planet’s atmosphere becomes.
Here are the direct-to-consumer sales numbers for Canada Goose in the last decade:
According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2023, the year Canada Goose logged its most impressive sales, was “the warmest year since global records began in 1850 at 1.18°C above the 20th century average of 13.9°C .” Moreover, as Canada Goose sales have surged so too has the global temperature. “The ten warmest years in the 174-year record,” NOAA continues, “have all occurred during the last decade (2014–2023).” Those ten years have, for Canada Goose, also been the most profitable.
If you zoom out a little farther, you see that Canada Goose’s explosive growth mirrors a half century’s worth of planetary warming. A time series of global temperature anomalies dating back to 1957, the year Canada Goose was founded, shows more and more heat in the atmosphere.
Global Land and Ocean January-December Temperature Anomalies https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202313
While I don’t deny Canada Goose’s right to keep plucking birds and stuffing coats, I do find myself asking why they have found such a ready and willing market. Actors, thieves, rappers, China, why are you pretending like the temperature is going in the opposite direction? Why are more and more of the glitterati on the streets of Shanghai and Seattle trying to look like Arctic explorers when the melting Arctic is looking more like Puget Sound in June?
Call me an ascetic. Call me cheap. But I call on all you overstuffed coat-wearing pseudo-adventurers to admit that you’re sweating underneath all that down.
It might be cold to say it but it must be said: It’s just not that cold.