It's a little like Mr. Obama's Cash-for-Clunkers programme, which sounds awesome at first, right? We got all those old polluting cars off of the roads! Except that they were by and large replaced with new cars whose manufacture caused far more pollution. And the programme expended funds which would have yielded a better result elsewhere.

I don't carry any water for plastic straws — haven't used them regularly since I was a kid — but it's easily imaginable that the political capital expended to ban them would have yielded better results for the environment elsewhere.

Heck, it's very possible that your metal straws themselves caused more environmental damage than the average man's lifetime straw consumption. Or not.