Beef (from dairy cows) vs Rice: carbon footprint
Beef (from dairy cows) or Rice? 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. Rice runs 4.45.
Beef (from dairy cows) is the heavier choice, about 7.5× Rice.
Swap Beef (from dairy cows) for Rice and you cut about 28.85 kg a kilo, near 87% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 169 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.
Rice: Modest. Fertiliser, the field itself, and a bit of milling.
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.