Beef (from dairy cows) vs Pork: carbon footprint
Beef (from dairy cows)33.3kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Pork12.31kg CO₂e / kg
Beef (from dairy cows) or Pork? 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. Pork runs 12.31.
Beef (from dairy cows) is the heavier choice, about 2.7× Pork.
Swap Beef (from dairy cows) for Pork and you cut about 20.99 kg a kilo, near 63% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 123 km drive in a diesel car.
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.