Beef (from dairy cows) vs Dark chocolate: carbon footprint
Beef (from dairy cows) or Dark chocolate? 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. Dark chocolate runs 46.65.
Dark chocolate is the heavier choice, about 1.4× Beef (from dairy cows).
Swap Dark chocolate for Beef (from dairy cows) and you cut about 13.35 kg a kilo, near 29% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 78 km drive in a diesel car.
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.
Dark chocolate: Cocoa is tied to deforestation, so a chocolate bar hides a surprisingly heavy footprint.
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.