Chicken vs Rapeseed oil: carbon footprint

Chicken9.87kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Rapeseed oil3.77kg CO₂e / kg

Chicken or Rapeseed 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. Rapeseed oil runs 3.77.

Chicken is the heavier choice, about 2.6× Rapeseed oil.

Swap Chicken for Rapeseed oil and you cut about 6.1 kg a kilo, near 62% off.

Per kilo, that gap is a 36 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.

Rapeseed 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.

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Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.