Beef vs Olive oil: carbon footprint
Beef or Olive oil? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Olive oil runs 5.42.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 18× Olive oil.
Swap Beef for Olive oil and you cut about 94.06 kg a kilo, near 95% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 551 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.
Olive oil: Pressing a whole crop into one bottle concentrates the footprint, so oils punch above their volume.
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.