Beef vs Potatoes: carbon footprint
Beef or Potatoes? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Potatoes runs 0.46.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 216× Potatoes.
Swap Beef for Potatoes and you cut about 99.02 kg a kilo, near 100% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 580 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.
Potatoes: Cheap on carbon, heavy on calories. Storage is the main cost once it's grown.
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.