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(disclaimer that I manage a climate group, but not a rice expert) They touch on, but don't get into the details on one of the more interesting aspects of peren

(disclaimer that I manage a climate group, but not a rice expert) They touch on, but don't get into the details on one of the more interesting aspects of perennial rice. Rice fields are actually a huge emitter of methane. Depending on the accounting, they contribute as much to global warming as the aviation sector. The fields emit methane when flooded, the stagnant water gets oxygen depleted, and the biomass in the soil degrades. This flooding is mostly used to control for weeds, but weeds have a much more difficult time competing when a perennial canopy already exists. So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions substantially.

melling 4y ago
The aviation sector is about 2%. Sounds like another premature optimization problem, as applied to climate change. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil“ https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization= https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization= What about coal? What about coal?
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  The need to eliminate coal emissions does not preclude the need to eliminate emissions from other sources.
  - melling 4y ago
    I suppose if we didn’t wait decades to eliminate the big problems, we’d have more time to worry about the smaller problems. A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice.
    - lkbm 4y ago
      Did the people working on rice hamper the work on coal? Or is the issue that they're wasting their time by doing anything but trying to get rid of coal? As best I can tell, neither you nor I are working on coal either.
      - throwaway2190 4y ago
        + while there are still people starving, this is helping to solve a big problem, it wasn't done for climate change, it's just nice that it might help there too.
    - insane_dreamer 4y ago
      So ... all agriculture scientists should stop what they're doing and become clean energy scientists?
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Why do people keep pretending that we can only focus on one industry at a time? News flash: WE CAN ADDRESS MORE THAN ONE AT A TIME. What about coal? You tell me, what part of fixing rice production interferes with shutting down coal mining? Because as far as anyone can tell, the answer is not a single part.
  - melling 4y ago
    We already are seeing climate issues. We could have been off coal by now. “A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice” By not addressing the big problems sooner, we have shortened the window to seeing significant problems. We’d have more time to solve the smaller problems, or they may take of themselves. For example, the population in China will drop significantly in this century. Unfortunately, it sounds like we are lining up our miracles so by 2050, we’ll be at net zero.
    - idopmstuff 4y ago
      Nothing you're saying here responds to the question. Everyone knows we're seeing climate issues. Why does making agricultural improvements prevent dealing with coal? > By not addressing the big problems sooner, we have shortened the window to seeing significant problems. This is true of all problems, not just the big ones. > We’d have more time to solve the smaller problems, or they may take of themselves. If we dealt with all of the smaller problems, we'd have more time to solve the larger problems, or they make take care of themselves. For example, the population in China will drop significantly this century, reducing the need for power consumption from coal plants.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      You are aware that there are eight billion humans on the planet, right? If everyone helped, we'd already be done: they're not. But conversely, it's not like we have ten people and we can either put them on coal, or on rice. We have millions of people actively involved at all levels, and the folks tackling rice have zero qualifications to solve coal, and vice versa. It's like complaining that the folks making bicycles aren't making office buildings: stop being part of the problem by pretending these are mutually exclusive problems to solve and that people should stop trying to solve entire percentage values. 2% is not "a drop in the bucket", 2% is a huge number. We can have different people work on different problems at the same time. By insisting we don't do something in parallel, all you're doing is telling folks to stop solving problems they can solve at an industrial scale. Are you solving coal, right now? No? Why are you wasting time and not solving coal? Oh you're doing something else atm? Why aren't you dropping that on the spot and solving coal? This is not a constructive attitude, it's flat out being part of the problem.
- mikeytown2 4y ago
  Emissions reduction isn't the goal, it's a nice side effect of this. Not needing to replant every year is the reason for using this rice.
- lars_francke 4y ago
  This is not an either/or thing. Germany emits 2% of all CO2, not worth us doing anything then?
  - quonn 4y ago
    Depends on the action. Gluing oneself to the street in order to prevent 5% of 2% of an industry that is rapidly shifting to EVs is questionable, for example.
    - lucb1e 4y ago
      Heard about someone who glued themselves to rails before a coal plant. Allegedly that prevented the equivalent of 800 years of average western european lifestyle emissions. Here I'm trying to get my own climate warming impact to be at least close to zero (and failing), and this dude has a 10x impact by doing nothing but sitting on rail for a bit. The cost is losing 9 months of their life on jail time. (Definitely an interesting proposition were it not for (1) the likely reality that some other coal/gas plant just spun harder during that time, and (2) that I'd likely get more jail time because I did it knowingly and found it worth it and as such it's not a sufficient deterrent.)
      - explaininjs 4y ago
        Is the idea that downstream consumers had an easier time retooling their processes to an entirely different power source than buying from a different coal plant? Questionable, at best.
      - hinkley 4y ago
        I'm trying to rehab a 10th of an acre of prairie that used to be temperate rainforest. That won't even offset my own impact on the rest of the world. But I'm showing up to meetings with other people, giving advice, hopefully some inspiration, as well as plants to make the process a little more accessible to other people. Best case at the end of this, I've helped dozens of people reduce their carbon footprint, and they've helped hundreds do the same, and so on. All of us will still have a positive carbon footprint, but we've called into question what the average footprint should look like. Us and a hundred other people who think about things like transportation or building standards or entertainment. The end goal is that becoming a giver instead of a taker represents sacrificing 10% of your lifestyle instead of 75%. It's very hard to peer pressure people into giving up 75% of what makes life worth living.
- knodi123 4y ago
  I litter frequently. Some people criticize me for it, but I rightly point out that my own litter is a tiny fraction of city-wide litter, and if I stopped, no one would even notice the difference. I'm not even the biggest contributor! Mechanized recycling trucks hoist the bins high in the air and let stuff fall into a hopper on the back, and on a windy day, every single bin they pick up produces a few pieces of litter. I don't know why I should change my lifestyle while trucks like that still exist.
  - mcdonje 4y ago
    I have mixed feelings about this comment. It's good satire. But that's something I expect on reddit. Over here, it seems like we're running afoul of the forum norms, and Poe's Law.
    - knodi123 4y ago
      That's fair. I meant it to be taken as an invitation to explain why (or why not) personal responsibility should matter in a world where the problems are complex and have a thousand sources. But I didn't do a good enough job of couching it that way, and it certainly pissed off the person I was replying to. I guess the responsible thing to do at this point is bail.
  - melling 4y ago
    Nice meaningless analogy. Let me fix it for you. “You litter frequently in your neighborhood, while 200 people litter in the park across town. What problem should the town address sooner?” We are at the brink of too late. Where did you go wrong? https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-climate-crisis-report-delivers-final-warning-on-15c https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-cli... Times up.
  - baxtr 4y ago
    I don’t know where you live, but listen: “Don’t mess with Texas!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2qIF3PL7lQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2qIF3PL7lQ
  - 4y ago
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Are you enjoying your whataboutism?
- hinkley 4y ago
  I'll tell you the same thing I tell the average knob who spews "premature optimization is the root of all evil" at me as a way to get out of having to think about anything uncomfortable, or ever accept culpability for any problems: You don't balance a budget by only looking at the tallest tent pole. You have to ask yourself what proportion of the overall budget a particular concern is 'worth' and figure out how to get there. Until that total is reduced to < 100% you will always be in debt. Starbucks or no Starbucks. From there you chip away at each element as the opportunity arises, balancing opportunity against cost (both of action and inaction). If something proves to be too hard to change, you have to compromise elsewhere. And in the long run, order only matters if you go bankrupt in the middle of the process.
ccooffee 4y ago
I hadn't heard about rice fields emitting methane before. I was able to quickly find an article, "Methane emissions from global rice fields: Magnitude, spatiotemporal patterns, and environmental controls"[0], which states: > Our study estimated that CH4 emissions from global rice fields varied from 18.3 ± 0.1 Tg CH4/yr (Avg. ±1 SD) under intermittent irrigation to 38.8 ± 1.0 Tg CH4/yr under continuous flooding in the 2000s, indicating that the magnitude of CH4 emissions from global rice fields is largely dependent on different water schemes. At 18.3-38.8 Tg CH4/yr, this estimate comes out to about 500-1500 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year according to an EPA GHG-equivalence calculator[1]. Global emissions are estimated at north of 34 billion tons of CO2-equivalent per year[2], putting the total CO2-equivalent from rice fields throughout the world at 1-3% of total global emissions. Wow. [0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GB005381 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
- ericpauley 4y ago
  To be fair, rice also provides ~20% of global caloric needs, so this isn’t necessarily an outsized contribution.
  - Aromasin 4y ago
    To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.
    - lettergram 4y ago
      “Our protein” isn’t exactly fair. Depending on the culture meat can account for as much as 90%+ of protein.
      - slily 4y ago
twawaaay 4y ago
I am not convinced (I grew up on a farm). It is usually harder to get rid of any weeds when your crop is growing on the field. After harvest, you just get rid of everything, turn the soil (but I don't know anything about rice farming) and you kinda get a fresh start. ON THE OTHER HAND, we already have robots that can easily identify weeds with a camera and zap them with lasers or other shit. Which just seems so much more reasonable in the near future than trying to harvest individual rice grains off of a perennial plant that cannot be damaged so that the plant can provide sun cover to prevent weeds... just not seeing it. Also, Chinese harvests rice up to three times a year. And the harvest itself is much easier if you can grab entire plants. So I am not convinced anybody is going to get interested in it.
- hosh 4y ago
  What about the people practicing permaculture and regenerative agriculture? There's been a big movement there to perennialize crops, and there are well-known patterns and practices from there to work with perennials.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Industrial farming of the sort you describe is destroying arable land, and relying on petrochemicals and strip mines to keep marginal land on life support. Properly managing the land using a mix of perennial crops and occasional rotation to pasture restores the soil, builds fertility, and requires very little in the way of inputs. Healthy plants in a polyculture setup where niches have been pre-filled also resist weed invasion better than monocultures. We do a lot of stupid shit in farming for the sole reason that farm machinery is specialized, and proper land management costs more (in the short run, in the long run the land is much more productive).
- contingencies 4y ago
  With typical rice farming in Asia, you see manual transplanting of each seedling in to small fields by women and children. This is back-breaking work and extremely slow. I can't think of another crop both this widely cultivated and painstaking. Therefore, not having to do this is a huge win. China has a multitude of climatic areas. Some harvest rice once per year, others two or three times per year. Even within Yunnan, the province in which tests are being made, all such areas exist. Many rice farms are small scale and on inaccessible land at the bottom of river valleys, terraced up hillsides, or otherwise inaccessible locations which would provide substantial scale-related and physical challenges to ease of automation. Try running an automated robot over this topography: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Terrace_field_yunnan_china_denoised.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Terrace_...
samstave 4y ago
"Rice is the national dish of the Philippines" -- A relative who worked in the Philippine government on RICE specifically His other quote was "we have this department because Rice needs to be on every plate, every meal" The flooding isnt to prevent weeds, its to prevent INSECTS, and rice is very water tolerant. --- So, wouldnt it be sane to say that perennial rice in a small growing area would be good.... also, have you ever seen rice drying on tarps on the side of the road? So in addition to this you also need to account for how the rice is harvested and dried...
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  You could just give the rice a haircut. Plants do pretty well getting reasonably mowed.
  - samstave 4y ago
    It is well known that grass does much better for Bees, when allowed to grow further than where Humans prefer their lawns. Anyone that actively kills nature is my enemy.
atleastoptimal 4y ago
Damn is there any commodity crop that isn't an environmental disaster?
- lm28469 4y ago
  It's all about the scale and the method. When all we care about is productivity and profit we end up with that
- hinkley 4y ago
  Legumes suck less, and fabaceae has an awful lot of perennials in the family tree.
- Maursault 4y ago
  Celery, cucumbers and mushrooms.[1] Celery is catabolic, but we could live on just cucumbers and mushrooms. [1] https://www.vegetableclimate.com/climate-credentials/greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-crop/ https://www.vegetableclimate.com/climate-credentials/greenho...
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Furiously making cucumber vinegar so you can pickle 10,000 cucumbers for the winter.
xyzzyz 4y ago
> So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions substantially. Not really. These GHG emissions from rice are in steady state with the amount of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. They do not add additional GHG to the atmosphere the way burning fossil fuel do. When you burn fossil fuels, the carbon atoms released into atmosphere have been captured from the atmosphere millions years ago. When weeds and other organic matter in flooded fields decompose, released carbon atoms have been captured only a couple of months or years earlier.
- squokko 4y ago
  Not true between CO2 and methane. The total amount of carbon is the same but in methane form is worse for greenhouse effect.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    Methane is worse, but it again doesn’t matter here, because the fields are in steady state not only with CO2, but with methane as well. Methane doesn’t linger in atmosphere forever, it decomposes into CO2 in a decade or so. This means atoms of methane emitted from the fields are pretty much exactly paired with atoms of methane in atmosphere decaying into CO2. This means that methane emitted from the fields doesn’t increase the total amount of methane in the atmosphere, the way burning fossil fuels does with CO2.
    - littlestymaar 4y ago
      This reasoning is completely wrong: there's an input and an progressive decay as output, the amount of methane in the atmosphere at any given point is directly related to the input.
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        Yes, this is exactly what I say in my comment. The amount of methane in the atmosphere is directly proportional to the input rate. That’s why, as I said, in steady state, when the we keep steady the amount of rice under cultivation, the amount of methane in atmosphere is not changing over time. Can you point to which part exactly is “completely wrong”?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 4y ago
> Depending on the accounting, they contribute as much to global warming as the aviation sector. Methane's contribution to global warming is proportional to the rate of change on a window of ~20 years. Emitting methane doesn't warm the world. What warms the world is increasing its emission. That focus on non-fossil fuel related methane emission is a huge piece of propaganda that people keep repeating. Most of those emissions were stable for decades. It's mostly fossil fuel related emissions that grew recently. (But yeah, reducing the emissions will lead to a cooling of the world that can compensate some amount of CO2 emissions for a short term.)
yunohn 4y ago
Just for context, rice is nearly on the bottom of the list of methane polluters - orders of magnitude lower than meat and even things like coffee. https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane
- philipkglass 4y ago
  That chart shows emissions per kilogram of food product. The absolute numbers are higher for rice because the world produces much more rice than coffee - about 10 million tons for coffee and 500 million tons for rice. That would put the absolute emissions from rice about 8 times higher than coffee (225 vs. 29 including methane emissions).
  - yunohn 4y ago
    Sure, but I would rate rice as way more important than coffee. 8x isn’t bad at all!
NelsonMinar 4y ago
The Economist had an article this week about rice and global warming: https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/03/28/the-global-rice-crisis https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/03/28/the-global-rice-cr...
photochemsyn 4y ago
This is a bit overblown. The methane being emitted is sourced originally from atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis, and while there is some anaerobic production of methane in rice paddies, the methane gets converted back to CO2 in the atmosphere with a half-life of 10-20 years IIRC. This is fundamentally different from natural gas emissions, in which carbon atoms are being transferred from stable geological reservoirs into the atmosphere, where they increase the CO2 levels after the methane is oxidized. There are also other risks to switching to this cultivation method: > "Researchers note potential risks. Because PR23 enables farmers to till less, fungi and other pathogens can build up in the fields. Insects can persist in the stubble after harvest, because it’s not plowed under, then transmit viruses when they feed on the regenerating sprouts in the spring. And without tilling, weeds can flourish; the researchers found that fields with PR23 needed one to two more herbicide treatments than regular rice. They also note that it’s more work to resow the perennial rice when its yield falters, because its larger and deeper roots need to be killed." https://www.science.org/content/article/perennial-rice-saves-time-and-money-comes-risks https://www.science.org/content/article/perennial-rice-saves...
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  > and while there is some anaerobic production of methane in rice paddies, the methane gets converted back to CO2 in the atmosphere with a half-life of 10-20 years IIRC. Methane is a far, far worse greenhouse gas than CO2, even accounting for the fact that it eventually decays back to CO2.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Methane is something like 25 times as effective at absorbing outgoing infrared radiation in the Earth's atmosphere relative to carbon dioxide, but there is > 200 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as methane (1.9 ppm vs 420 ppm). https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-methane-set-another-record-during-2021 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-me... So the net effect of all the methane is about 50 ppm. About 30% comes from fossil fuels. This leaves a big burp relative to preindustrial levels (comparable to 20 ppm CO2), likely from the expansion of human agriculture, more cows, maybe forest removal. We're locked into it now due to permafrost melt and increased rainfall in to the tropical belt, swapping out one strain of rice for another will have marginal effects at best. > "NOAA scientists are concerned that the increase in biological methane may be the first signal of a feedback loop caused in part by more rain over tropical wetlands that would largely be beyond humans’ ability to control." The tipping point has come and gone, we're heading for the Pliocene. Plan accordingly.
sdwr 4y ago
I believe that flooding rice fields has a substantial positive impact on yields, and not just by combating weeds. Controlled flooding creates the perfect moisture + nutrient environment.
SomeBoolshit 4y ago
Hey, that's a disclosure.
kleton 4y ago
But the flooding is also where most of the nitrogen fixation comes from. An environment that makes methane makes ammonia too.
ChatGTP 4y ago
Most rice fields I know of have water running through them ? Slowly but it’s not stagnant.
11235813213455 4y ago
what about meat production? how does it compare to rice? This would be more relevant than comparing something completely avoidable (planes) with basic food

melling 4y ago

The aviation sector is about 2%. Sounds like another premature optimization problem, as applied to climate change. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil“ https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization= https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization= What about coal? What about coal?

insane_dreamer 4y ago
The need to eliminate coal emissions does not preclude the need to eliminate emissions from other sources.
- melling 4y ago
  I suppose if we didn’t wait decades to eliminate the big problems, we’d have more time to worry about the smaller problems. A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice.
  - lkbm 4y ago
    Did the people working on rice hamper the work on coal? Or is the issue that they're wasting their time by doing anything but trying to get rid of coal? As best I can tell, neither you nor I are working on coal either.
    - throwaway2190 4y ago
      + while there are still people starving, this is helping to solve a big problem, it wasn't done for climate change, it's just nice that it might help there too.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    So ... all agriculture scientists should stop what they're doing and become clean energy scientists?
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Why do people keep pretending that we can only focus on one industry at a time? News flash: WE CAN ADDRESS MORE THAN ONE AT A TIME. What about coal? You tell me, what part of fixing rice production interferes with shutting down coal mining? Because as far as anyone can tell, the answer is not a single part.
- melling 4y ago
  We already are seeing climate issues. We could have been off coal by now. “A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice” By not addressing the big problems sooner, we have shortened the window to seeing significant problems. We’d have more time to solve the smaller problems, or they may take of themselves. For example, the population in China will drop significantly in this century. Unfortunately, it sounds like we are lining up our miracles so by 2050, we’ll be at net zero.
  - idopmstuff 4y ago
    Nothing you're saying here responds to the question. Everyone knows we're seeing climate issues. Why does making agricultural improvements prevent dealing with coal? > By not addressing the big problems sooner, we have shortened the window to seeing significant problems. This is true of all problems, not just the big ones. > We’d have more time to solve the smaller problems, or they may take of themselves. If we dealt with all of the smaller problems, we'd have more time to solve the larger problems, or they make take care of themselves. For example, the population in China will drop significantly this century, reducing the need for power consumption from coal plants.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    You are aware that there are eight billion humans on the planet, right? If everyone helped, we'd already be done: they're not. But conversely, it's not like we have ten people and we can either put them on coal, or on rice. We have millions of people actively involved at all levels, and the folks tackling rice have zero qualifications to solve coal, and vice versa. It's like complaining that the folks making bicycles aren't making office buildings: stop being part of the problem by pretending these are mutually exclusive problems to solve and that people should stop trying to solve entire percentage values. 2% is not "a drop in the bucket", 2% is a huge number. We can have different people work on different problems at the same time. By insisting we don't do something in parallel, all you're doing is telling folks to stop solving problems they can solve at an industrial scale. Are you solving coal, right now? No? Why are you wasting time and not solving coal? Oh you're doing something else atm? Why aren't you dropping that on the spot and solving coal? This is not a constructive attitude, it's flat out being part of the problem.
mikeytown2 4y ago
Emissions reduction isn't the goal, it's a nice side effect of this. Not needing to replant every year is the reason for using this rice.
lars_francke 4y ago
This is not an either/or thing. Germany emits 2% of all CO2, not worth us doing anything then?
- quonn 4y ago
  Depends on the action. Gluing oneself to the street in order to prevent 5% of 2% of an industry that is rapidly shifting to EVs is questionable, for example.
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    Heard about someone who glued themselves to rails before a coal plant. Allegedly that prevented the equivalent of 800 years of average western european lifestyle emissions. Here I'm trying to get my own climate warming impact to be at least close to zero (and failing), and this dude has a 10x impact by doing nothing but sitting on rail for a bit. The cost is losing 9 months of their life on jail time. (Definitely an interesting proposition were it not for (1) the likely reality that some other coal/gas plant just spun harder during that time, and (2) that I'd likely get more jail time because I did it knowingly and found it worth it and as such it's not a sufficient deterrent.)
    - explaininjs 4y ago
      Is the idea that downstream consumers had an easier time retooling their processes to an entirely different power source than buying from a different coal plant? Questionable, at best.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      I'm trying to rehab a 10th of an acre of prairie that used to be temperate rainforest. That won't even offset my own impact on the rest of the world. But I'm showing up to meetings with other people, giving advice, hopefully some inspiration, as well as plants to make the process a little more accessible to other people. Best case at the end of this, I've helped dozens of people reduce their carbon footprint, and they've helped hundreds do the same, and so on. All of us will still have a positive carbon footprint, but we've called into question what the average footprint should look like. Us and a hundred other people who think about things like transportation or building standards or entertainment. The end goal is that becoming a giver instead of a taker represents sacrificing 10% of your lifestyle instead of 75%. It's very hard to peer pressure people into giving up 75% of what makes life worth living.
knodi123 4y ago
I litter frequently. Some people criticize me for it, but I rightly point out that my own litter is a tiny fraction of city-wide litter, and if I stopped, no one would even notice the difference. I'm not even the biggest contributor! Mechanized recycling trucks hoist the bins high in the air and let stuff fall into a hopper on the back, and on a windy day, every single bin they pick up produces a few pieces of litter. I don't know why I should change my lifestyle while trucks like that still exist.
- mcdonje 4y ago
  I have mixed feelings about this comment. It's good satire. But that's something I expect on reddit. Over here, it seems like we're running afoul of the forum norms, and Poe's Law.
  - knodi123 4y ago
    That's fair. I meant it to be taken as an invitation to explain why (or why not) personal responsibility should matter in a world where the problems are complex and have a thousand sources. But I didn't do a good enough job of couching it that way, and it certainly pissed off the person I was replying to. I guess the responsible thing to do at this point is bail.
- melling 4y ago
  Nice meaningless analogy. Let me fix it for you. “You litter frequently in your neighborhood, while 200 people litter in the park across town. What problem should the town address sooner?” We are at the brink of too late. Where did you go wrong? https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-climate-crisis-report-delivers-final-warning-on-15c https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-cli... Times up.
- baxtr 4y ago
  I don’t know where you live, but listen: “Don’t mess with Texas!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2qIF3PL7lQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2qIF3PL7lQ
- 4y ago
pfdietz 4y ago
Are you enjoying your whataboutism?
hinkley 4y ago
I'll tell you the same thing I tell the average knob who spews "premature optimization is the root of all evil" at me as a way to get out of having to think about anything uncomfortable, or ever accept culpability for any problems: You don't balance a budget by only looking at the tallest tent pole. You have to ask yourself what proportion of the overall budget a particular concern is 'worth' and figure out how to get there. Until that total is reduced to < 100% you will always be in debt. Starbucks or no Starbucks. From there you chip away at each element as the opportunity arises, balancing opportunity against cost (both of action and inaction). If something proves to be too hard to change, you have to compromise elsewhere. And in the long run, order only matters if you go bankrupt in the middle of the process.

ccooffee 4y ago

I hadn't heard about rice fields emitting methane before. I was able to quickly find an article, "Methane emissions from global rice fields: Magnitude, spatiotemporal patterns, and environmental controls"[0], which states: > Our study estimated that CH4 emissions from global rice fields varied from 18.3 ± 0.1 Tg CH4/yr (Avg. ±1 SD) under intermittent irrigation to 38.8 ± 1.0 Tg CH4/yr under continuous flooding in the 2000s, indicating that the magnitude of CH4 emissions from global rice fields is largely dependent on different water schemes. At 18.3-38.8 Tg CH4/yr, this estimate comes out to about 500-1500 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year according to an EPA GHG-equivalence calculator[1]. Global emissions are estimated at north of 34 billion tons of CO2-equivalent per year[2], putting the total CO2-equivalent from rice fields throughout the world at 1-3% of total global emissions. Wow. [0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GB005381 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

ericpauley 4y ago
To be fair, rice also provides ~20% of global caloric needs, so this isn’t necessarily an outsized contribution.
- Aromasin 4y ago
  To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    “Our protein” isn’t exactly fair. Depending on the culture meat can account for as much as 90%+ of protein.
    - slily 4y ago

twawaaay 4y ago

I am not convinced (I grew up on a farm). It is usually harder to get rid of any weeds when your crop is growing on the field. After harvest, you just get rid of everything, turn the soil (but I don't know anything about rice farming) and you kinda get a fresh start. ON THE OTHER HAND, we already have robots that can easily identify weeds with a camera and zap them with lasers or other shit. Which just seems so much more reasonable in the near future than trying to harvest individual rice grains off of a perennial plant that cannot be damaged so that the plant can provide sun cover to prevent weeds... just not seeing it. Also, Chinese harvests rice up to three times a year. And the harvest itself is much easier if you can grab entire plants. So I am not convinced anybody is going to get interested in it.

hosh 4y ago
What about the people practicing permaculture and regenerative agriculture? There's been a big movement there to perennialize crops, and there are well-known patterns and practices from there to work with perennials.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Industrial farming of the sort you describe is destroying arable land, and relying on petrochemicals and strip mines to keep marginal land on life support. Properly managing the land using a mix of perennial crops and occasional rotation to pasture restores the soil, builds fertility, and requires very little in the way of inputs. Healthy plants in a polyculture setup where niches have been pre-filled also resist weed invasion better than monocultures. We do a lot of stupid shit in farming for the sole reason that farm machinery is specialized, and proper land management costs more (in the short run, in the long run the land is much more productive).
contingencies 4y ago
With typical rice farming in Asia, you see manual transplanting of each seedling in to small fields by women and children. This is back-breaking work and extremely slow. I can't think of another crop both this widely cultivated and painstaking. Therefore, not having to do this is a huge win. China has a multitude of climatic areas. Some harvest rice once per year, others two or three times per year. Even within Yunnan, the province in which tests are being made, all such areas exist. Many rice farms are small scale and on inaccessible land at the bottom of river valleys, terraced up hillsides, or otherwise inaccessible locations which would provide substantial scale-related and physical challenges to ease of automation. Try running an automated robot over this topography: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Terrace_field_yunnan_china_denoised.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Terrace_...

samstave 4y ago

"Rice is the national dish of the Philippines" -- A relative who worked in the Philippine government on RICE specifically His other quote was "we have this department because Rice needs to be on every plate, every meal" The flooding isnt to prevent weeds, its to prevent INSECTS, and rice is very water tolerant. --- So, wouldnt it be sane to say that perennial rice in a small growing area would be good.... also, have you ever seen rice drying on tarps on the side of the road? So in addition to this you also need to account for how the rice is harvested and dried...

CuriouslyC 4y ago
You could just give the rice a haircut. Plants do pretty well getting reasonably mowed.
- samstave 4y ago
  It is well known that grass does much better for Bees, when allowed to grow further than where Humans prefer their lawns. Anyone that actively kills nature is my enemy.

atleastoptimal 4y ago

Damn is there any commodity crop that isn't an environmental disaster?

lm28469 4y ago
It's all about the scale and the method. When all we care about is productivity and profit we end up with that
hinkley 4y ago
Legumes suck less, and fabaceae has an awful lot of perennials in the family tree.
Maursault 4y ago
Celery, cucumbers and mushrooms.[1] Celery is catabolic, but we could live on just cucumbers and mushrooms. [1] https://www.vegetableclimate.com/climate-credentials/greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-crop/ https://www.vegetableclimate.com/climate-credentials/greenho...
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Furiously making cucumber vinegar so you can pickle 10,000 cucumbers for the winter.

xyzzyz 4y ago

> So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions substantially. Not really. These GHG emissions from rice are in steady state with the amount of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. They do not add additional GHG to the atmosphere the way burning fossil fuel do. When you burn fossil fuels, the carbon atoms released into atmosphere have been captured from the atmosphere millions years ago. When weeds and other organic matter in flooded fields decompose, released carbon atoms have been captured only a couple of months or years earlier.

squokko 4y ago
Not true between CO2 and methane. The total amount of carbon is the same but in methane form is worse for greenhouse effect.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Methane is worse, but it again doesn’t matter here, because the fields are in steady state not only with CO2, but with methane as well. Methane doesn’t linger in atmosphere forever, it decomposes into CO2 in a decade or so. This means atoms of methane emitted from the fields are pretty much exactly paired with atoms of methane in atmosphere decaying into CO2. This means that methane emitted from the fields doesn’t increase the total amount of methane in the atmosphere, the way burning fossil fuels does with CO2.
  - littlestymaar 4y ago
    This reasoning is completely wrong: there's an input and an progressive decay as output, the amount of methane in the atmosphere at any given point is directly related to the input.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      Yes, this is exactly what I say in my comment. The amount of methane in the atmosphere is directly proportional to the input rate. That’s why, as I said, in steady state, when the we keep steady the amount of rice under cultivation, the amount of methane in atmosphere is not changing over time. Can you point to which part exactly is “completely wrong”?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marcosdumay 4y ago

> Depending on the accounting, they contribute as much to global warming as the aviation sector. Methane's contribution to global warming is proportional to the rate of change on a window of ~20 years. Emitting methane doesn't warm the world. What warms the world is increasing its emission. That focus on non-fossil fuel related methane emission is a huge piece of propaganda that people keep repeating. Most of those emissions were stable for decades. It's mostly fossil fuel related emissions that grew recently. (But yeah, reducing the emissions will lead to a cooling of the world that can compensate some amount of CO2 emissions for a short term.)

yunohn 4y ago

Just for context, rice is nearly on the bottom of the list of methane polluters - orders of magnitude lower than meat and even things like coffee. https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane

philipkglass 4y ago
That chart shows emissions per kilogram of food product. The absolute numbers are higher for rice because the world produces much more rice than coffee - about 10 million tons for coffee and 500 million tons for rice. That would put the absolute emissions from rice about 8 times higher than coffee (225 vs. 29 including methane emissions).
- yunohn 4y ago
  Sure, but I would rate rice as way more important than coffee. 8x isn’t bad at all!

NelsonMinar 4y ago

The Economist had an article this week about rice and global warming: https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/03/28/the-global-rice-crisis https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/03/28/the-global-rice-cr...

photochemsyn 4y ago

This is a bit overblown. The methane being emitted is sourced originally from atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis, and while there is some anaerobic production of methane in rice paddies, the methane gets converted back to CO2 in the atmosphere with a half-life of 10-20 years IIRC. This is fundamentally different from natural gas emissions, in which carbon atoms are being transferred from stable geological reservoirs into the atmosphere, where they increase the CO2 levels after the methane is oxidized. There are also other risks to switching to this cultivation method: > "Researchers note potential risks. Because PR23 enables farmers to till less, fungi and other pathogens can build up in the fields. Insects can persist in the stubble after harvest, because it’s not plowed under, then transmit viruses when they feed on the regenerating sprouts in the spring. And without tilling, weeds can flourish; the researchers found that fields with PR23 needed one to two more herbicide treatments than regular rice. They also note that it’s more work to resow the perennial rice when its yield falters, because its larger and deeper roots need to be killed." https://www.science.org/content/article/perennial-rice-saves-time-and-money-comes-risks https://www.science.org/content/article/perennial-rice-saves...

CrazyStat 4y ago
> and while there is some anaerobic production of methane in rice paddies, the methane gets converted back to CO2 in the atmosphere with a half-life of 10-20 years IIRC. Methane is a far, far worse greenhouse gas than CO2, even accounting for the fact that it eventually decays back to CO2.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Methane is something like 25 times as effective at absorbing outgoing infrared radiation in the Earth's atmosphere relative to carbon dioxide, but there is > 200 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as methane (1.9 ppm vs 420 ppm). https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-methane-set-another-record-during-2021 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-me... So the net effect of all the methane is about 50 ppm. About 30% comes from fossil fuels. This leaves a big burp relative to preindustrial levels (comparable to 20 ppm CO2), likely from the expansion of human agriculture, more cows, maybe forest removal. We're locked into it now due to permafrost melt and increased rainfall in to the tropical belt, swapping out one strain of rice for another will have marginal effects at best. > "NOAA scientists are concerned that the increase in biological methane may be the first signal of a feedback loop caused in part by more rain over tropical wetlands that would largely be beyond humans’ ability to control." The tipping point has come and gone, we're heading for the Pliocene. Plan accordingly.

sdwr 4y ago

I believe that flooding rice fields has a substantial positive impact on yields, and not just by combating weeds. Controlled flooding creates the perfect moisture + nutrient environment.

SomeBoolshit 4y ago

Hey, that's a disclosure.

kleton 4y ago

But the flooding is also where most of the nitrogen fixation comes from. An environment that makes methane makes ammonia too.

ChatGTP 4y ago

Most rice fields I know of have water running through them ? Slowly but it’s not stagnant.

11235813213455 4y ago

what about meat production? how does it compare to rice? This would be more relevant than comparing something completely avoidable (planes) with basic food