Apples vs Beef: carbon footprint
Apples or Beef? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Apples runs about 0.43 kg CO₂e a kilo. Beef runs 99.48.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 231× Apples.
Swap Beef for Apples and you cut about 99.05 kg a kilo, near 100% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 580 km drive in a diesel car.
Apples: Light. Fruit needs little land or feed, and most of its footprint is the farm and the truck.
Beef: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Per-kilo numbers skip portion size and how the food was farmed, so take them as the shape of things, not the last word.
More match-ups
Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.