And I replied telling you you were wrong.

Rice is one of the most environmentally friendly carb sources, and in its native environments is an essential plant. Corn takes up more space and the production and refining creates more CO2 than rice. Potatoes are much more vulnerable to rot and much more likely to fail, not to mention the much higher fertilizer requirements.

Climate change is not one thing. Methane isn’t the enemy. Hell CO2 isn’t the enemy. It is taking out things out of balance. If we were to eliminate rice and just grow corn, yes, we’d drop 10% of methane production… except we wouldn’t because corn requires 5x the fertilizer and fertilizer production is a larger contributor to GHG emissions than aviation and shipping.

Corn is also horribly space inefficient outside the US. Not just outside the Americas, but outside specifically the midwest in the US. Despite it now being attempted to be grown on every continent there is no place on Earth besides the US and Canada that corn becomes more productive per hectacre than rice. It simply cannot replace rice, which is more productive on every single other continent.

So that’s 5x the fertilizer, at least 1.5x the space (up to 3x the space) which then logarithmically increase the amount of CO2 produced for transportation and production, all while destroying native ecosystems (or at least ecosystems that have adapted to rice farming over the last few thousand years), oh and we can’t forget water management systems would need to change drastically so add 50 years of construction to any CO2 calcs.

‘Methane bad’ is true, sure, but we can’t look at one single source, which provides HALF OF ALL CALORIES CONSUMED BY HUMANS, and say that’s a thing that needs to switch. If we replaced corn with rice tomorrow the world would have a net negative GHG production from where we started. The same is not true in reverse, despite rice causing a minor amount of separate methane production.

Given the number of calories per tonne of methane produced, no, no it’s not hurting the climate.

This kinda complain is the same as ‘well if we just eliminate humans we’ll solve climate change,’ like yeah, no shit. But the point is keeping humans alive and rice is uniquely good at just that.

To anyone wondering, no, rice is not hurting the climate. Unlike many water-intense crops, people are not trying to grow rice in the middle of the American desert.