Beef (from dairy cows) vs Coffee: carbon footprint
Beef (from dairy cows)33.3kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Coffee28.53kg CO₂e / kg
Beef (from dairy cows) or Coffee? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef (from dairy cows) runs about 33.3 kg CO₂e a kilo. Coffee runs 28.53.
It's close. Beef (from dairy cows) and Coffee land in roughly the same place.
Beef (from dairy cows): Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Coffee: Comes from growing and processing the crop, plus whatever it ships in.
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.