Beef vs Cheese: carbon footprint
Beef99.48kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Cheese23.88kg CO₂e / kg
Beef or Cheese? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Cheese runs 23.88.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 4.2× Cheese.
Swap Beef for Cheese and you cut about 75.6 kg a kilo, near 76% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 443 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.
Cheese: Same cows, same methane. Milk and cheese carry it in every glass and slice.
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.