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:

Romney & Santorum, both bad news for the environment.Photos: WEBN TV's Political Pulse & IowaPolitics.comRick Santorum, who surged at the last minute to give Mitt Romney a real run for his money in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, is less green than his rival, and decidedly nuttier when it comes to climate change. But let's not split hairs here. Both men will staunchly defend fossil fuels, and neither is likely to do much of anything to fight global warming.

Mitt Romney has expressed qualified concern about climate change over the years, and then vacillated about how much of it is human-caused and whether we should try to do anything about it.

No wobbling of that sort from Santorum -- he's an out-and-out denier. "There is no such thing as global warming," he told a smiling Glenn Beck on Fox News in June 2011. That same month, he told Rush Limbaugh that climate change is a liberal conspiracy: "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."

Mitt Romney.Photo: Gage SkidmoreWhere does Mitt Romney stand on climate change and energy issues? Brace yourself: He doesn't have that flip-flopper reputation for nothing.

Then

Romney used to be one of the more sane Republicans when it comes to climate change. He would play up uncertainty and use weasel words, but he still acknowledged global warming as a problem.

In his 2010 book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, Romney wrote:

I believe that climate change is occurring -- the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor. I am uncertain how much of the warming, however, is attributable to factors out of our control.

Hey, lemme tell you about gas prices ... (Photo by Roger H. Goun.)

Newt Gingrich told conservative activists on Wednesday that Sarah "Drill Baby Drill" Palin would be an ideal candidate for secretary of energy.

"I can't imagine anybody who would do a better job of driving us to an energy solution than Gov. Palin, for example," Gingrich said during a conference call hosted by Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition. "Tell her that she would certainly be on the list of one of the people we would consider."

I'd rather be texting.Amidst all the hand-wringing over distracted driving, a critical point is getting lost. The problem isn't the texting -- it's the driving.

Clive Thompson made this argument in Wired last year:

When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they're doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?

The answer, of course, is public transit. In many parts of the world where texting has become ingrained in daily life -- like Japan and Europe -- public transit is so plentiful that there hasn't been a major texting-while-driving crisis. You don't endanger anyone's life while quietly tapping out messages during your train ride to work in Tokyo or Berlin.

... Dramatically increasing public transit would also decrease our carbon footprint, improve local economies, and curtail drunk driving. (Plus, we'd waste less time in spiritually draining bumper-to-bumper traffic.)

Sharing systems are all the rage

Can less consumption be more fun? Yes, when it's social. The "collaborative consumption" trend didn't start this year (the Zipcar car-sharing service launched way back in 2000), but the sharing movement has blossomed big-time. Airbnb, which lets you rent your home to travelers, made the biggest splash in 2011. People are also sharing their cars, kitchen utensils, gardens, taxis, DVDs, jobs -- you name it. Think of it as the fine art of consensual mooching.

A new ad from the Democratic National Committee is pummeling Mitt Romney for his extensive record of flip-floppery on global warming and so much more: