Beef vs Dark chocolate: carbon footprint
Beef or Dark chocolate? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Dark chocolate runs 46.65.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 2.1× Dark chocolate.
Swap Beef for Dark chocolate and you cut about 52.83 kg a kilo, near 53% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 309 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.
Dark chocolate: Cocoa is tied to deforestation, so a chocolate bar hides a surprisingly heavy footprint.
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.