Beef vs Cane sugar: carbon footprint
Beef or Cane sugar? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Cane sugar runs 3.2.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 31× Cane sugar.
Swap Beef for Cane sugar and you cut about 96.28 kg a kilo, near 97% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 564 km drive in a diesel car.
Beef: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Cane sugar: Growing the crop plus the energy to refine it. Not nothing, nowhere near beef.
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.