Chicken vs Soybean oil: carbon footprint
Chicken or Soybean 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. Soybean oil runs 6.32.
Chicken is the heavier choice, about 1.6× Soybean oil.
Swap Chicken for Soybean oil and you cut about 3.55 kg a kilo, near 36% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 21 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.
Soybean 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.