Cheese vs Lamb: carbon footprint
Cheese23.88kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Lamb39.72kg CO₂e / kg
Cheese or Lamb? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Cheese runs about 23.88 kg CO₂e a kilo. Lamb runs 39.72.
Lamb is the heavier choice, about 1.7× Cheese.
Swap Lamb for Cheese and you cut about 15.84 kg a kilo, near 40% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 93 km drive in a diesel car.
Cheese: Same cows, same methane. Milk and cheese carry it in every glass and slice.
Lamb: 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.