Reducing Rice’s Carbon Footprint | Hacker News Reader

Reducing Rice’s Carbon Footprint

researchfrontiers.uark.edu

31 pointssah2ed8 comments

Interesting article.

Meat, cheese and eggs have the highest carbon footprint. Fruit, vegetables, beans and nuts have much lower carbon footprints.

In my opinion all of them are serious problems that need some kind of solving.

Figures from the Environmental Working Group’s Meat Eater’s Guide and the EPA’s Guide to Passenger Vehicle Emissions show that rice is ranked on 10th position out of 16 and it has a 2.7 CO2 Kilos Equivalent and a 6 Car Miles Equivalent.

Grazing animals are the best way to fight desertification. It doesn't have to be cattle (sheep, goats and other grazing animals help)... grazing rotation helps dramatically. Beyond this benefit, which should not be underestimated, I consider them factories from changing low density nutritional sources where I cannot practically get what I need into higher density nutritional sources.

I'm not saying it's a net positive or negative. But, for the most part, the cattle aren't raised as responsibly as possible, and beyond that, the benefits aren't accounted for. We can do better without vilifying meat.

I say this as I cannot handle legumes and am very diabetic. I just cannot handle protein sources that are higher in carbohydrate, or refined proteins from legumes (which is most vegetable protein). I do well on mostly eggs, meat and some cruciferous veg. And even eggs, I sometimes have issues with soy fed.

I wish they’d work on the arsenic problem Arkansas rice has too

That's more a soil contamination problem than a rice problem.

Rice does absorb much more arsenic from the environment than other crops, so maybe it could be engineered to do that less. In the meantime, we should have stricter standards on arsenic content.

I imagine engineering it to absorb less of a given substance would almost certainly cause it to absorb less of things it needs as well.

Besides, if editing plants were that easy, we'd have C4 rice already.

I don't know if C4 rice would help with this but there's another carbon related rice problem on the horizon

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-depart...

Great read - really interesting stuff

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