Beef vs Pulses: carbon footprint
Beef or Pulses? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Pulses runs 1.79.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 56× Pulses.
Swap Beef for Pulses and you cut about 97.69 kg a kilo, near 98% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 572 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.
Pulses: 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.