Organic Beef Has a Larger Carbon Footprint Than Feedlot Beef | No matter the way it’s raised, beef comes with a steep climate cost (sentientmedia.org)

submitted 2 days ago by usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml to c/environment@beehaw.org

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[-] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

Shipping is generally a lot more efficient per kg than you would think. For instance the article looked at 9000 km boat transportation for beef

Transporting food by boat emits 23 grams of CO2eq per tonne of product per kilometer. Transporting the 9000 kilometers from Central America to the UK, therefore, emits 0.207 kilograms CO2eq [9000km * 23g per tonne-kilometer / 1000 / 1000 = 0.207 kg CO2eq per kg]. This is equivalent to 0.35% of the total footprint of 60 kilograms of CO2eq per kilogram of beef.

We could change that to be New Zealand to Iceland (on the complete top of the globe and far away laterally too), but we'd still find it's a small portion of emissions. We'd bump up our distance to 15900 km or so meaning ~1.76x more distance than what they did the math on, putting it at ~0.6-0.7% of total beef emissions. Still not a significant driver compare to eating beef in the first place

[-] deadbeef79000 1 points 1 day ago

Cool, nice to have figures!

this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026

44 points (94.0% liked)

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