Photo by Rob Stone.

In the course of writing my two recent posts on vegetarianism, I came across some interesting data. According to a 2011 poll conducted by Harris Interactive:

• About 2.5 percent of Americans are vegan, saying they never eat meat, poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, or dairy.

• Another 2.5 percent are lacto-ovo vegetarian, meaning they also skip the flesh but still eat eggs and/or dairy.

• Add those up and you get 5 percent vegetarian (or, if you take into account the margin of error, 2 to 8 percent).

In addition to the vegetarians, 33 percent of Americans eat meatless meals on a regular basis, the poll found.

It's time to let the voters play DJ. (Photo by Jeremy Ryan)

20:  number of Republican presidential primary debates held over the past year

839:  number of unique questions asked at those debates

109:  number of questions about "how conservative" candidates are

3:  number of questions about the Keystone XL pipeline

2:  number of questions about climate change

1:  number of questions about pizza crust

Those are some of the findings of journalism students at NYU's Studio 20, led by professor Jay Rosen. They analyzed all of the questions journalists asked at the debates and broke them down into topic areas. Only 1 percent got categorized as fluff (e.g., when Herman Cain was asked, "Deep dish or thin crust?"), but many of the questions focused on the horse-race aspects of the primary -- polls, negative ads, flip-flops, campaign strategy, "electability" -- and not on the kinds of substantive issues that most Americans are actually concerned about.

The environment got particularly short shrift: More questions were asked about the moon than about the earth.

Rick Santorum, even nuttier than you think. (Photo by Dave Maass.)

Rick Santorum is way crazy when it comes to environmental issues. How crazy? He makes Newt Gingrich's moon-colony plans sound plausible and Mitt Romney's climate flip-floppery look presidential.

On climate change

While Mitt and Newt have both felt compelled to repudiate their former concern for climate change, Santorum can boast that he's a denier of long standing.

“There is no such thing as global warming,” he told Glenn Beck on Fox News in June 2011.

“It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life and I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative,” he told Rush Limbaugh that some month.

He went further at an event in Colorado on Feb. 6:

Photo by Elvert Barnes.

In a nutshell

TransCanada, a Canadian corporation, wants to build a massive oil pipeline down through the middle of the U.S., more than 1,000 miles long and three feet in diameter. The Keystone XL would carry crude from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas along the Gulf of Mexico.

As tar-sands oil is much dirtier and worse for the climate than regular old oil, this plan has climate hawks and many other sane people quite unhappy. The route as originally proposed would have gone through Nebraska and crossed about 250 miles of the Ogallala Aquifer, the nation's largest underground source for drinking water and crop irrigation -- a prospect that made lots of Nebraskan farmers, ranchers, and other folks unhappy. Now the route is up in the air -- as is everything else about the pipeline.

Because the Keystone XL would cross national borders, the State Department would have to issue a permit for it to be built. After a lot of drama, State said no. But that was by no means the end of the story. Here's how the situation has played out so far ...

(Photo by Walmart)

A letter to the editor in the latest issue of The Atlantic is right in line with what Stacy Mitchell reported in her Grist series on Walmart's greenwashing:

I have worked for Walmart for 15 years (I am a salaried member of management) and read with interest “How Walmart Is Changing China.” While I feel much better about the company since it has started making strides toward sustainability (we are required to recycle everything, including organic waste, at my store), there is still so much waste that it feels like no more than a drop in the ocean. We have been doing this for years, but I still see very few sustainable products for sale in the store.

Organic-product lines are a joke, as there is very little offered. Products made from recycled materials are equally hard to find. The amount of products thrown away at my store alone makes me sick, and I try to avoid thinking of it in terms of companywide waste. For example, though we do give food to the Salvation Army for distribution, we easily throw away enough to feed hundreds a year because it goes bad before we can sell it or donate it. The paper waste at individual stores is astronomical also.

Walmart is so big that any effort, however well-intentioned, is never enough. The last line in the story says it all: “It may nonetheless end up being very bad business for humankind.”

Name withheld at reader’s request

This post is part of Protein Angst, a series on the environmental and nutritional complexities of high-protein foods. Our goal is to publish a range of perspectives on these very heated topics. Add your feedback and story suggestions here.

Vegetarians are out of luck again ...

In his 2000 bestseller Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain swatted down vegetarians on behalf of the foodie elite:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

A lot has changed in the last decade. Now all the hot new chefs, and most of the big-name old-timers too, preach the gospel of local, seasonal, and sustainable. They flaunt their friendships with the organic farmers in their foodsheds. Their menus are paeans to the small-scale and the artisanal.

But one thing hasn't changed: Vegetarians still get no respect.

This post is part of Protein Angst, a series on the environmental and nutritional complexities of high-protein foods. Our goal is to publish a range of perspectives on these very heated topics. Add your feedback and story suggestions here.

Out of fashion and proud of it. (Photo by KayVee.INC)

It used to be that when I told a fellow progressive I’m a vegetarian, I would get one of three reactions: (1) an enthusiastic “me too!,” (2) a slightly guilty admission of falling off the veg wagon, or (3) a voracious defense of the glories of steak.

These days, there's another increasingly common reaction: People look at me with a mix of pity and confusion, like I'm some holdover from the '90s wearing a baby-doll dress with chunky shoes and babbling on about No Doubt. I can see what they're thinking: "You're still a vegetarian?"

At some point over the past few years, vegetarianism went wholly out of style.

Now sustainable meat is all the rage. "Rock star" butchers proffer grass-fed beef, artisanal sausage, and heritage-breed chickens whose provenance can be traced back to conception on an idyllic rolling hillside. "Meat hipsters" eat it all up. The hard-core meaties flock to trendy butchery classes. Bacon has become a fetish even for eco-foodies, applied liberally to everything from salad to dessert, including "green" chocolate bars and "sustainable" ice cream.

(Photo by Alex Howard.)

Clean energy rocks. Nice, deserving people get jobs at wind-turbine plants. Solyndra-style investments are critical. Oil-industry subsidies suck. Energy efficiency is an economic engine. We need to drill, baby, drill. And we need to frack, baby, frack.

Those weren't the words, but those were the sentiments in the energy portion of President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday night. He dedicated a significant chunk of the speech to energy issues, making an unexpectedly vigorous appeal for renewable power, cleantech investment, and efficiency -- as well as for natural-gas fracking and oil drilling.

Newt Gingrich has been all over the map on climate change. Instead of trying to pinpoint all his many stances from over the years (who even has that many pins?), I'll just highlight a few key moments.

In 2008, when the cool kids were at least feigning concern for climate change, Gingrich appeared with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a TV ad for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. “[O]ur country must take action to address climate change,” Gingrich solemnly proclaimed.

Put that condom down right now!Photo: Gage SkidmoreRick Santorum isn't just a climate denier -- he's a contraception denier. He believes contraception exists, but he apparently wishes it didn't, and he's eying ways to deny you access to it.

No, we're not talking about abortion here, though of course he wants to deny you access to that too. We're talking basic contraception -- the Pill, condoms, all the stuff that more than 99 percent of American women (and some smart men) use to prevent pregnancy and STDs.

Get a load of this, from an interview Santorum gave in October 2011: