Eggs vs Lamb: carbon footprint

Eggs4.67kg CO₂e / kg
vs
Lamb39.72kg CO₂e / kg

Eggs or Lamb? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.

Eggs runs about 4.67 kg CO₂e a kilo. Lamb runs 39.72.

Lamb is the heavier choice, about 8.5× Eggs.

Swap Lamb for Eggs and you cut about 35.05 kg a kilo, near 88% off.

Per kilo, that gap is a 205 km drive in a diesel car.

Eggs: Middling. Hens eat feed, but there's no methane belch, so eggs sit well below beef.

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.

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