Chicken vs Pulses: carbon footprint
Chicken or Pulses? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Pulses runs 1.79.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 5.5× Pulses.
Swap Chicken for Pulses and you cut about 8.08 kg a kilo, near 82% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 47 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.
Pulses: Beans and peas fix their own nitrogen, so they dodge most fertiliser emissions. Very low.
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.