Beet sugar vs Chicken: carbon footprint
Beet sugar or Chicken? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beet sugar runs about 1.81 kg CO₂e a kilo. Chicken runs 9.87.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 5.5× Beet sugar.
Swap Chicken for Beet sugar and you cut about 8.06 kg a kilo, near 82% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 47 km drive in a diesel car.
Beet sugar: Growing the crop plus the energy to refine it. Not nothing, nowhere near beef.
Chicken: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
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.