Beef vs Rice: carbon footprint
Beef99.48kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Rice4.45kg CO₂e / kg
Beef or Rice? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Rice runs 4.45.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 22× Rice.
Swap Beef for Rice and you cut about 95.03 kg a kilo, near 96% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 556 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.
Rice: Modest. Fertiliser, the field itself, and a bit of milling.
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.