Beef vs Peanuts: carbon footprint
Beef or Peanuts? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Peanuts runs 3.23.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 31× Peanuts.
Swap Beef for Peanuts and you cut about 96.25 kg a kilo, near 97% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 563 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.
Peanuts: Beans and peas fix their own nitrogen, so they dodge most fertiliser emissions. Very low.
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.