https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-soil-science-revolution-upends-plans-to-fight-climate-change-20210727/

Well, this seems bad. So apparently the prevailing model for carbon sequestration in soil is just. Completely wrong?

So, I've been researching the statement about rice exacerbating climate change by increasing methane emissions.  My first question was how rice increases methane emissions since there wasn't any intuitively obvious (to me) mechanism whereby that happens.  I was able to find out that it wasn't the rice itself causing the increase, but rather microorganisms that find standard rice paddies an ideal growth medium.  My second question was whether there was a way to reduce the methane being produced by rice paddies without reducing overall yields.  Apparently, there is.  It seems that many varieties of rice can be grown with less water, which can significantly cut the methane producing microorganisms.  The issue of course is that there's insufficient incentives for most rice growers to use methods that produce less methane.  As this method also uses less water, it seems like it has the potential to be greatly valuable to incentivize.

Here's some articles that were talking about how to reduce the environmental impact of this staple crop without decreasing rice yields:

http://www.ghgonline.org/methanerice.htm

https://www.wri.org/blog/2014/12/more-rice-less-methane

This is an example of a valuable improvement that can't be implemented on the consumer buying level.  Given the groups who would be disproportionately impacted by such a directive, It's also rather racist to imply to consumers that they should just eat less rice, or that they should feel bad for eating rice. 

I think it is important for people to be aware of situations like this, though.  If we want positive changes to happen, we need to at least know what those positive changes should be.  This also doesn't come close to addressing the entire environmental footprint of agriculture, it's just one of the areas where it seems worth looking into how we can improve matters.

I see this argument a lot--that the solution to the environmental issues or racism or any other problem currently inherent to our food supply is to 'eat local'.  And I don't really see how this addresses any of those issues. 

A large factory farm can be operating locally.  In fact, it can be operating locally in many, many places around the world.  It could even at times source food locally so that it can sell it to people who want to 'eat local'.

Even if you make sure to avoid large factory farms (keeping in mind that impoverished people in food deserts can rarely afford to do this), there's nothing inherently anti-racist about a small farm using land that is, in many countries, often stolen from natives (eg. in the United States where I live that would be from Native Americans) and exploiting immigrants (especially natives from Mexico, Central, and South America in the US) or preventing natives from subsisting off of this land for the farmer's own personal profit and enrichment.  

And I don't see how 'eating local' does anything inherently to address the harmful monocultures in much of the world's farming or the reliance on harmful fertilizers and pesticides or the degradation of local wildlife or the depletion of local aquifers in my or any other country.

This doesn't mean that I think the idea of eating local has no worth, but without addressing the above questions, it seems to me little more than a false panacea to the many and complex issues we face regarding our food supply.

Fixing climate change will require doing something about the enormous corporations who are not doing remotely enough to curb it, and indeed commit gross negligence in this respect, but at the same time it's important to keep in mind that change at the individual level will also be necessary.  Changing the corporations will lay the groundwork for fixing the infrastructure, but there is no realistic way that individuals can expect that nothing will need to change in our lifestyle, especially for those of us who live in the first world.  Either it will change because we did not act fast enough and the ravages of climate change will destroy our livelihoods (and very possibly our very lives), or it will change because we did act and made the needed adjustments in our lifestyles.  Not all of these changes would mean a reduction in quality of life, but likely many of them would be, or at least would be seen as such.  We must implement great structural changes above the level of the individual, and these changes will be necessary to halt climate catastrophe, but they will not be sufficient. 

I suspect that the vast majority of individuals, especially in the first world, will need to reduce their use of energy, their use of plastics, and the distances they travel (not only on vacations but also for work and errands).  We will probably need to own fewer electronics (a painful thought to me, as I'm a tech enthusiast, but if we make such technology much more widely available in libraries, that would go a long way to helping me get over the loss).  Another example--A lot of people in the US are not used to public transit, and the US doesn't have anywhere near the public transit infrastructure it needs to support everyone in the US, so in the short term while that is being built it's likely that people will simply need to drive less without any comparable alternative to replace it.  There's no doubt that represents a significant sacrifice for many people.  At the very least it will mean that many people's lives will look very different, even if all the necessary structural changes are made (eg. making it easy for people to live close to work or telecommute).  On the bright side? No more traffic jams, transportation fatalities would almost certainly drop precipitously, and people who can't drive could be more independent in a society that is built around reducing driving.  We will need to reduce our use of the plastics we have come to rely on for so many things.  This is not an easy or trivial task, as plastics have many properties that can make them difficult to replace with other materials.  I'm not even sure if it's possible for us to completely eliminate our use of plastics, but we need to find as many avenues to reduce and reuse them as possible.  Not to mention the changes in diet that would almost surely need to come with any of the vast structural changes we would need to make to agriculture to reduce its impact on climate change. Any change to the type or quantity of foods produced will be very noticeable to people.  The important thing we need to understand is that we can either guide that process ourselves to ensure the least amount of suffering, or we can let climate change destroy our current means of production and force sudden radical changes and starvation.  There isn't a no consequences scenario, not for the majority of us.

I put a big emphasis on having particularly durable outdoor clothes and gear for every occasion I might reasonably expect to experience, though recently climate change has started to make the worst weather even worse, so maybe I should consider investing in additional gear. I will say that even weather that's tolerable if someone's out in it for a few minutes can be absolutely grueling and even deadly over longer durations without the right gear. And let's be real, some of the weather lately is not even tolerable under short durations without very specialized gear lol.