Beef vs Tofu: carbon footprint
Beef or Tofu? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Tofu runs 3.16.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 31× Tofu.
Swap Beef for Tofu and you cut about 96.32 kg a kilo, near 97% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 564 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.
Tofu: Tofu and soy milk hand you protein at a fraction of beef's footprint. The swap that actually moves the needle.
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.