Could Climate Change Make Rice Unhealthy?

A U.S. company called Impossible Metals submitted a request last week to the Interior Department asking to start the leasing process for exploration and mining off the coast of American Samoa in the Pacific Ocean and inside the U.S. national border. The region is thought to have nodules that contain minerals like nickel, cobalt, copper, magnesium, and rare earths, which are important for electronic devices and electric vehicles. The metals are also used by aerospace and military contractors.

That region isn’t the only area of the Pacific that is the target of seabed mining operations. A Canadian company revealed recently that it has been in talks with the Trump administration to dredge nodules in an area between Hawai’i and Mexico. The company plans to request a license from the U.S. in June.

According to the Financial Times, the White House is drafting an executive order to stockpile metals from the Pacific seabed. The rush is on because China, which is the dominant supplier of some critical metals and magnets, has stopped exporting them in reaction to Trump’s imposition of tariffs.

Vacuuming up the seabed, especially below 200 meters, to harvest minerals could have devastating impacts on marine life and biodiversity by, among other things, creating sediment plumes and noise pollution. Since 2014, the practice has been the subject of talks among nations that have signed on to the UN’s International Seabed Authority that has the responsibility of regulating mineral extraction on the seabed outside national borders; however, the U.S. is not a member of the organization.

Empire Wind 1, as it’s called, is being built by the Norwegian company Equinor. The project could have started supplying electricity next year, but it was halted last week by the Trump administration, after the contractor has already invested about $2 billion in it.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said through a social media post that the Biden administration had rushed the approval of the construction without sufficient analysis. However, no law or regulation has been cited to support Burgum’s claim. The environmental approval process for the Empire Wind 1 by the Bureau of Ocean Management started in 2021 and was completed about 2.5 years later after impact statements were issued and comment periods had run.

Reuters reports that currently the administration is speeding up environmental reviews for other projects after declaring a national energy emergency. Since his inauguration, Trump has issued executive orders aimed at propping up coal, oil, and gas. The president’s disdain for renewable energy, especially offshore wind, was shown just after his inauguration when he signed an executive order halting new leases in federal waters and suspending permits for all wind projects. In March, the administration revoked a permit for a wind project off New Jersey that had not yet started construction.

Recently, Trump falsely claimed that wind energy is harming whales, saying that it’s driving them “loco.”  The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has concluded there is no evidence that offshore wind sites cause whale deaths.

Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health say warming temperatures combined with rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels will cause higher concentrations of inorganic arsenic in rice, raising the risk of cancers and other conditions like heart disease and diabetes.

Arsenic gets into rice, partly because of how it’s grown. Farmers put seedlings in fields and then flood them so the plants can outcompete weeds. The rice sucks up the water—and everything in it—which can include both naturally occurring and pollution-based sources of arsenic.

The team says climate change will mean rice takes up more arsenic than it does now by altering the soil’s chemistry. More carbon and warmer temperatures will make arsenic-loving bacteria in soils more prolific and easier for the roots of rice plants to absorb. Given current projections for greenhouse gases and the likelihood that temperatures will exceed 2.0 C, the authors say that by 2050, there could be a sharp rise in lung and bladder cancers, especially for people in China who consume rice. 

There are a few things you can do to lower your exposure to arsenic. White and basmati rice tend to have less arsenic than brown. Also, rice from Nepal, north India or north Pakistan has less arsenic because those regions have lower amounts of the chemical in soils and water. On the agriculture side, the team recommends research into breeding plants that minimize arsenic uptake and improving soil management practices in rice paddies.

The study was published in The Lancet Planetary Health.

There are alternatives, some made from cloth or others that are compostable, but a solution that uses the waste itself to decompose the diaper might be the hero we’ve been waiting for—hero as in HIRO Technologies, a startup in Austin, Texas, that’s made a diaper with plastic-eating fungi that feed off a baby’s poop.

According to the company’s kickstarter campaign, baby poop and urine are fertilizer for fungi, which as they munch, secrete enzymes that break down the carbon chains in plastic and convert it into soil. The HIRO “MycoDigestible” diaper is made with some of the same plastic as other brands, including polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polypropylene (PP), and polyethylene (PE), but the difference is that it comes with a fungi-filled pouch that’s placed in the diaper before it’s tossed in the garbage. After a few weeks in a landfill, the fungi awaken, and the magic starts to happen.

The HIRO solution comes on the heels of previous research and recent research around plastic-eating fungi that offers hope for tackling this outsized problem, in which microplastics are piling up in rivers, oceans, and even in us. Most experts say the goal should be to reduce the use of plastics in the first place. Additionally, current fungi-based solutions can’t yet be used at scale, something the HIRO company acknowledges and why their next step will be to work with landfills to add fungi to their operations. Perhaps with these new diapers, changing tables could be a place to start changing habits.