Beef vs Cassava: carbon footprint
Beef99.48kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Cassava1.32kg CO₂e / kg
Beef or Cassava? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Cassava runs 1.32.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 75× Cassava.
Swap Beef for Cassava and you cut about 98.16 kg a kilo, near 99% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 575 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.
Cassava: Cheap on carbon, heavy on calories. Storage is the main cost once it's grown.
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.