Chicken vs Olive oil: carbon footprint
Chicken or Olive oil? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Olive oil runs 5.42.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 1.8× Olive oil.
Swap Chicken for Olive oil and you cut about 4.45 kg a kilo, near 45% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 26 km drive in a diesel car.
Chicken: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Olive oil: Pressing a whole crop into one bottle concentrates the footprint, so oils punch above their volume.
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.