Yep. I fell into level 3 in 2004 when the melting tundra ice started releasing methane in an amount that far dwarfs man-made CO2 emissions over the last 2000 years or so.

And we've now been in that positive feedback loop for 21 years (the warmer it gets, the more methane ice in the tundra melts, which worsens the carbon load of the atmosphere, which causes more global warming).

And there is NOTHING you can do to "stop global warming" at all, except maybe adjust to it by buying a bigger air conditioner for your house (or better yet, a smarter one, now that we know how ground loop heat pumps work).

+1 for the excellent pun ;)

(I'd also add that, beyond water, while plant cell walls (fibre) do also "water down" their protein content, plant cells also tend to be lower in fats than animal cells, and said fats "water down" their protein content (particularly on a per-calorie basis, but also to a lesser extent on a volumetric basis)

No, I literally wrote "Unless we are talking a truly gigantic amount of vegetables". Most vegetables contain very little protein.

Per calorie or per gram? And if per gram, raw or cooked, and if the latter, to what water percentage? Green vegetables are actually quite comparable to or superior to meat on a per-calorie basis. Per gram, if cooked to equivalent water content, meat usually leads, but not by that much. However, raw, meat vastly exceeds raw green vegetables in protein per gram. The main difference is that raw vegetables are primarily water. But the non-water content is actually quite protein rich.

As for "staples", the phrase "bread and water" for a minimal tedious diet isn't so named because bread lacks sufficient protein to keep you alive; it's because it very specifically does. 3000 calories of whole wheat flour (a daily calorie requirement) contains 102 grams of protein. For a 70kg worker, that's 1,45 g/kg daily intake, nearly double the recommended minimum daily intake.

The thing you need to remember is that both animals and plants use protein as their building blocks. Every bit of "machinery" in a cell is made of protein, whether it's an animal cell or a plant cell. This includes, for example, all of the machinery involved in photosynthesis (RiBisCo, the carbon-fixing protein, is the most abundant protein on Earth). The main difference between the two is that plants have cell walls (fibre) and large vacuoles (water reserves).

You are also conflating what is the optimal amount of protein with what people die from.

No, you are confusing that. The minimum recommended daily intake of 0,8 g/kg protein per day isn't "the level you die from if you don't get it", it's the RDA, the level where deficiency symptoms start to become noticeable if sustained for a long period. The amount which would actually kill an otherwise healthy adult if sustained for long periods is in the ballpark of 0,4 g/kg. Of course, people with various health conditions can be more susceptible to protein deficiency than the general population.

All the world's vegans will suffer from protein deficiency if they don't already.

This is demonstrably false. Vegans consume on average less protein than the median population, to be sure, but most vegans are still well above the recommended daily consumption. The population in the US that suffers from protein deficiency is alcoholics.

What vegans tend to commonly suffer deficiencies of without supplementation is iron and B12. Without fortification, B12 cannot be gotten in any meaningful quantity from a vegan diet. B12 is however commonly fortified in foods and only microscopic amounts are needed.

Just as a random example, I asked an AI to generate a typical vegan who is not focused on their nutritional intake meal routine for a day. Here's what it came up with:

---
Breakfast:
A large bowl of oatmeal made with rolled oats, soy milk, a tablespoon of peanut butter, a sliced banana, and a handful of walnuts. This is accompanied by a large glass of orange juice.

Lunch
A substantial burrito filled with black beans, white rice, guacamole, salsa, and vegan sour cream. On the side, a small bag of tortilla chips.

Afternoon Snack
A store-bought vegan protein bar and a large apple.

Dinner
A large serving of spaghetti with a store-bought vegan marinara sauce and three vegan meatballs. A side salad with mixed greens, cherry tomatoes, and a vinaigrette dressing is also included.

Evening Snack
Two pieces of toast with vegan butter and jam, alongside a handful of almonds.
---

Looks pretty normal to me for your typical modern vegan. Now let's break down that protein:

Here is a detailed breakdown of the approximate protein content per meal:
Meal Food Item Estimated Protein (grams)
Breakfast Total 25.8
Large bowl of oatmeal (1.5 cups cooked) 10.5
Soy milk (1 cup) 7.0
Peanut butter (1 tablespoon) 3.6
Sliced banana (1 medium) 1.1
Walnuts (1 ounce) 4.3
Large glass of orange juice (12 oz) 2.0
Lunch Total 24.5
Large burrito tortilla 5.0
Black beans (1 cup) 15.2
White rice (1 cup) 4.3
Guacamole (1/4 cup) 1.0
Salsa (2 tablespoons) 0.5
Vegan sour cream (2 tablespoons) 0.5
Small bag of tortilla chips (1 ounce) 2.0
Afternoon Snack Total 20.5
Store-bought vegan protein bar 20.0
Large apple 0.5
Dinner Total 33.5
Large serving of spaghetti (2 cups cooked) 16.0
Vegan marinara sauce (1 cup) 2.0
Vegan meatballs (3) 15.0
Side salad with mixed greens and tomatoes 0.5
Vinaigrette dressing 0.0
Evening Snack Total 11.0
Two pieces of toast 7.0
Vegan butter and jam 0.0
Handful of almonds (1 ounce) 6.0

Daily total: 115.3

Let's go with 70kg as the body mass. That's 115.3 / 70 = 1.64 g/kg daily protein intake - over double the recommended minimum of 0,8g/kg.

You are conflating amino acids with "protein".

That's because almost all of the amino acids you consume are consumed in the form of protein.

not all sources of "protein" are the same.

Deficiencies of specific amino acids, while common in some sustenance farming societies, are extremely rare in modern societies. Even a modicum of diversity in diets prevents it. It's a problem if you're, say, overwhelmingly eating just corn, or just rice, or whatnot.

Green veggies have essentially no fat or carbs, their ONLY calorie source is "protein", so of course "protein per calorie" is high.

And your point is? You need a certain number of calories per day to survive - you have to get them from somewhere. A higher ratio of green plants for those calories is a higher protein diet, not a lower one.

And you've compared it to meat with high calorie content from fat.

I compared broccoli to the most common form of ground beef sold in the US, and watercress to cod, one of the highest protein / leanest meats on the market.

And absolutely no one is making that mistake.

Practically the entire internet and practically every cooking show is making that mistake. "Add a protein" is used synonymously with "add meat".

But meats have complete proteins

To repeat, "complete proteins" is nonsense in modern society. The very person who came up with the combination of protein combining has since stated that it's bullshit. The American dietetic society says it's bullshit. Basically nobody in a modern society is failing to get complete proteins unless by "modern society" you mean somewhere that's undergoing literal starvation.

What percentage?

Based on my personal experience, I'd wager "80+%". There's literally a popular diet called the "caveman diet" / "paleo diet", which is primarily meat, which - to reiterate - is not actually what the majority of stone-age peoples actually ate. An actual paleolithic diet would be a high fibre diet.

And hunter-gatherer may be "high-protein" compared to other diets, but our ancestors did not eat as much as we did

Calorie consumption is a law of survival. Some can be attributed to a higher resting metabolism from a higher body mass, but by far most is due to activity, and early societies were much more active than modern populations. And as most early food sources were not as calorie-rich as modern ones - plants had not been bred to be as high calorie / easily digestible as modern ones and were not highly processed, and the average meat was leaner - the average early human ate significantly more. Otherwise, they would not have had the calorie consumption to match their level of activity.

This isn't really accurate. Yes, it's common for early societies to have short mean lifespans. But most of that is due to high child mortality, not "most people die in their 40s".

Our guts are very good at digesting protein, regardless of source.

There are certain things that it's difficult to extract from plants, such as iron. Protein is not among them.

Protein deficiency is not common among modern vegans; it's actually very rare. However, certain hunter gatherer societies and esp. many sustenance farming societies have struggled with it. Sustenance farming tends to be the worst because there's commonly just one or two major crops, which may be either low protein (relative to calories) or lack sufficient of specific essential amino acids. But modern diets are so diverse that it's quite difficult to get protein deficiency, even on a vegan diet (in modern societies, protein deficiency is most common among alcoholics, not vegans). Vegans struggle most with iron, and - if they don't eat supplemented foods - B12 (no plant contains meaningful B12).

Also, if you cut ~10% off industry A due to policy A... but you also cut off ~10% of industry B due to policy B, and industry C due to policy C, and on and on up through industry Z, then you end up cutting 10% off your entire economy.

In the current state, some industries are being needlessly hurt for political reasons by less than 10%, but some by vastly more than 10%.

They're also making the weird assumption that only meat contains protein.

It's a shame that all of the world's vegans (let alone vegetarians) have spontaneously died of protein deficiency.

There's also this weird notion among a large percentage of the population that a high-protein diet is "natural" and is what our ancestors ate. Certainly *some* hunter-gatherers ate a lot of protein (there's a great deal of diversity in traditional diets), but the mean hunter-gatherer society did not. In areas rich in sago, for example, it's common for ~75% of calories to be from sago alone (nearly pure carbs), and in extreme cases up to 90% - not counting other plants on top of that - with much of the protein coming from sago grubs.

If there's one thing that our ancestors almost universally tended to eat a lot more of than today (unless your ancestors were, say, Inuit), it's fibre.

Also, meat is not a synonym for protein. A typical green veggie without its water, like freeze-dried broccoli (~0% water content) has ~50% more protein per calorie than your most common grade of ground beef (20% fat) at 0% water content (beef wins per-gram, but only by ~20%), and watercress at 0% water is nearly as high as cod at 0% water per-calorie. The main difference is that said veggies are overwhelmingly water before cooking, and that most modern peoples eat way less of them than they do of meat, so in a typical modern diet it's a small percentage. But hunter-gatherer societies tend not to be so picky, and plant-based food sources in most places tended to be more available than meat-based ones - in the stone age, your ancestors were probably chowing down heavily on things like nettle stew, wild cabbage, goosefoot, dock, mugwort, plaintain, etc. That said, starchy or fatty plant-based sources tend to have poor protein/calorie ratios, and meat provided an important supplement (as well as hard-to-get nutrients like B12 and iron).

Honestly, I think there's only one way in which these libertarian secessionists will ever get their desired country that they keep trying for, which is, LOTS and LOTS of money, used to buy a tiny plot of land from one or more impoverished countries that they'll recognize as independent, and to buy recognition from as many impoverished countries as they can, as well as to buy protection from multiple PMCs and private militias, as well as to go out of their way to avoid ticking off the US, Russia, and China.

It'd take an Elon Musk-scale funder, or a combination of lesser billionaires, being obsessed with the project enough to dump most of their wealth into making it happen.

100% this. "Hey, I'm not calling for violence - I'm just calling for seizing a city from the people who live there by subverting their local police force against them and bypassing elections unless we can ensure we'll win." Calling that "culture war" is to heavily play down the seriousness of what he is advocating; he is advocating for technofascist revolution.

The "word on the street" is that statins, medicines that lower bad cholesterol although I think it is hope over experience that they raise "good" (HDL) cholesterol, don't do much of anything for people who haven't had a heart attack. Once you have had a heart attack, their benefit to living longer is unmistakable.

Someone point me to a source saying this is wrong.