Beef vs Palm oil: carbon footprint
Beef or Palm 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. Palm oil runs 7.32.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 14× Palm oil.
Swap Beef for Palm oil and you cut about 92.16 kg a kilo, near 93% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 540 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.
Palm 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.