Cheeseburger

[Geoff]

4.85 kg CO2e    Jamais Cascio has calculated the carbon footprint of a cheeseburger here:    http://www.openthefuture.com/cheeseburger_CF.html    "That's a total of 3.6-6.1 kg of CO2-equivalent per burger"    He shows his calculations and gives some references.    Should we average his figure to 4.85 kg?

[jamie]

surely this depends on where the burger is from, I imagine macdonalds and burger king are the worse (if the quality of there food is anything to go by) but surely a local burger stall making an effort to use local produce isnt as bad?

[Geoff]

The cheeseburger calculation above uses an estimate of Global Warming Potential for methane of 23.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential)

This is based on the effect of methane compared to carbon dioxide over a period of 100 years.
If climate change is considered to be urgent (and accelerating due to feedback mechanisms) a shorter time scale should perhaps be used. The Wiikipedia article gives a GWP for methane over a period of 20 years as 62, almost three times. This would add about another 4.4 kilogrammes of CO2e per burger.

That gives 9.25kg CO2e per burger.