I hadn't thought about it that way before, but I think you're exactly right. I feel this in myself. I am pro-environment, or at least I want to be. But when I think about the actual effects of all these laws and regulations it just makes me mad and want to ignore or fight ALL environmental laws. I have to use a paper straw now? It just seems to go on and on.
Have you ever gone on a vacation? I'd wager that flight you took is 10000x worse for the environment than whatever reduction in your lifetime straws. Trust me you will be perfectly fine without going on vacation!
It seems odd to me that someone would question whether straws are essential, but have no problem with vacations.
I also am offended when people expressing any interest are deflected into “why don’t care about this so much?” It’s not important how passionate GP is about straws. Address the content of their message, not whether they are super interested in a topic or not.
Yes, paper feels way worse to drink out of, objectively.
You can be fine without a lot of things. In the early 1950s, after the war, my grandpa raised a 5-head family in a single room. Two of the kids went to a university, no serious diseases etc.
The average living standard can be reduced surprisingly low before you run into any issues. Once the city you live in has good sewage system, enough doctors, enough food and not a major problem with drugs, the life expectancy will be reasonably high even with five people per room and one car per twenty families.
Another thing is that people won't vote for that.
Yes, life is about to get less convenient and we have to give up some luxuries.
It doesn't matter if you don't like it, it a fact.
Sure we can. And we will. The choices of most of the world's population surely disagrees with this.
"Yes, life is about to get less convenient and we have to give up some luxuries."
I don't think that's the case, but we will see.
For the record, ideologically, I'm on your side. Realistically, I just don't see a world where the majority of people change.
The stop using the plastic straw argument applies to people who don't like straws. Tell the same anti-straw folks to stop traveling, stop having pets, no more children. You see where this goes - It just doesn't work.
There are laws against chemicals that are known to cause environmental harm.
There are laws against vehicles that pollute too much. Soon there will be laws against cars vehicles that pollute at all.
All we have to do is make laws, and more and more of them are coming.
Again, it doesn't matter what an individual wants.
For humans, laws and rules are meant to be overstepped : this is how our species got so far : by considering rules, laws and traditions, and say "well, whatever, I will try it my way and see how it goes"
In recent months dozens of shops got multi-million dollar fines from the EPA for "deleting " diesel emission equipment. Now it's unheard of in the US.
It works.
There's also a lot of gradient in the effect of environmental laws. As an example my family still has tons of plastic bags that get reused over and over again until they become unusable or land as a trash bag. I don't know the math of it all but considering we buy plastic trash bags anyway we might as well get them from shopping instead of buying them separately. I have no idea what the global impact has been on plastic bag production but it could be interesting to see, assuming such a statistic exists.
I really don't like this take when I see it.
Do you care about just the next 50 years, or the next hundreds+? Do you have children/grandchildren? Do you care about an increase in the quantity and impact of natural disasters? The resulting increase in death, suffering, insurance premiums? What about more unpleasantly hot days? Less snow on the ski slopes?
All of that stuff is important to me, even though it almost certainly won't kill me personally. It's just such a no-brainer that the environment and climate is something to cherish and protect. Even if you're generally pro-environment, referring to environment-protection measures as fearmongering only makes it harder to enact them and increase their scale.
It might be due to me being surrounded by automotive enthusiasts but the general view of recent environmental laws in my circles is that they exist mostly to motivate spending and move some local pollution somewhere else. It's kind of the combination of nonsensical laws and short term effect exaggeration that offends people, making them stubborn/resistant to accepting things that actually make sense. It's probably offset by people who get a sense of urgency out of it but I withhold my right to dislike it.
those are the nonsensical laws i see
That depends heavily on where you live.
3.6 billion people live in areas that are at a very high risk from climate change.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...
> There's a lot of fearmongering
If you have better credentials than the WHO and leading climatologists around the world then I'd love to hear about them.
but solutions never benefit all parties. Laws tend to tell some group what not to do, so most laws will inconvinience someone. You just need to figure out who the law and targeting (and REALLY targeting, not just what PR says) and then follow the money from there.
Solutions can benefit all parties in any context (and the best ones do), but environmental protection is unique because the solution must benefit all parties. This is because, while some will sacrifice for the sake of the world, some will not. Convenience compels the lazy to change. No amount of coercion, or threat of force will change that.
It's rather tedious to take a straw out of a drink, dry it off, and find somewhere to put it.
I can't tell you how many times I bought one small item I intended to carry out of the store with me, and the cashier just automatically put it in a plastic bag. "Oh, I don't need a bag," I'd say. The cashier would then proceed to take the item out of the bag, and throw the bag away.
(No animosity intended towards the cashiers, who have difficult jobs. But we should have a better process.)
There are now perfectly functional composable straws, but people still need to compost them.
And I don’t like going without. I like straws. I like their utility. I like the way they work in the car. They let me rate limit the beverage flow rather than something else, such as the ice dam at edge of the cup.
I’m also a big fan of ice.
The closest solution I’ve found are lids with small openings. Starbucks coffee lids are good examples, but they’re also “strawless” cup lids with a small lid over a hole.
They’re not a replacement for straws, but they’re not awful like paper straws are. Some leak though. Puts them lower on the fun scale.
Not a big fan of the stainless steel ones either to be honest.
There’s two ways I generally think of this:
1) who knows what is actually essential. I can’t judge what others truly need and don’t know of an objective board who can. Is art necessary? Is coke necessary? Are luxury vehicles necessary?
2) people choose what’s needed by buying them and prioritizing their money toward it. So by existing and being purchased that’s proof enough of necessity.
I’m sure as hell not carrying and keeping clean a collapsible metal straw on the off chance that I’ll want to drink a drink one day. It seems like the mental stress of that would outweigh the negative impact of a thousand plastic straws (not to mention the energy spent to create the collapsible metal straw in the first place). It’s important to keep in mind all the tradeoffs and not to create negative overall effects from the aim of improving only environmental effects.
I have been avoiding lids and straws for two decades now, because they are wasteful, but when I have need of a straw and lid it's nice if they work.
I cannot speak to cost, but wax, paper/cardboard performs well enough for just about any food related purpose. Not suitable for shakes? Make them thicker.
Wax would help way more for most use cases, but the added material would help for thicker mediums.
Waxed paper straws are a thing and are almost as good as plastic straws. I am not sure why they are not more common. Pretty rare actually.
Moreover, wax is not one chemical compound but is a broad term for a variety of very different chemical compounds shoved under the «wax» umbrella term due to sharing same properties: being solid, lipophilic and malleable. Anything that shares such properties is a wax.
There are four broad categories of wax:
– Plant based (e.g. soy, carnauba, castor, jojoba, tallow and others)
– Animal based (beeswax, lanolin – from sheep, Chinese wax – from insects)
– Petroleum (paraffin and microcrystalline)
– Mineral waxes (peat and ceresin are most important ones).
Other than beeswax, long term health effects of ingesting a wax are unknown. Plant based waxes can't be completely purified and will contain miniscule amounts of potentially harmful phytochemicals that may have a detrimental effect on the human body. Animal based waxes are already known to cause irritation in some people and are likely to mess up the hormonal system in the long term. They can just a have a rancid or a funny smell – sufficient to be unsuitable to put in one's mouth.
Petroleum based waxes… Food-grade paraffin wax has been used in foodstuffs for a while since it passes the digestive tract unchanged, yet it is an open question whether it also creates microparticles that settle in the body and have a potential to affect our health. Impurities in petroleum and in waxes overall are a major source of concern, and it is a matter of time when somebody unscrupulous quietly swaps out a higher grade product for a cheap and nasty one.
The bottom line is that long term health effects of the wax ingestion on the human body are unknown, and – by extension – wax coated paper straws are probably not a solution, not a safe one anyway until proven otherwise.
Metal straws are the most inert ones, but even then aluminium leeching into food through cookware has already been implicated as a potential contributor to the onset of Alzheimers and steel has an amount (albeit small) of nickel in it… it just never ends.
For the record, I'm in camp, "Don't care that much, whatever straws are fine". I'd be happy if as a society we could just get people not to litter like other developed countries manage to. I have a lot of junk which ends up in my front yard (people tossing garbage from passing cars) and my backyard (a river where all kinds of styrofoam, plastic cups, plastic bags, etc. all wash up). If all the junk was biodegradable it wouldn't hang around my yard and require me to pick it up (or I could at least toss it on the burn pile).
Then again if only <1% of people use plastic than it used be, we're already winning very much.
And putting a collapsible one back in your pocket after it's sticky is a bit disingenious.
I'd prefer focusing on better recycling than replacing by worse alternatives (eg PFAS coated paper)
I live in Spain so 80% of the year I don't use a coat. And water I would just buy when I need it :)
When I go hiking I do bring those things but then I don't come across places that sell iced drinks :)
Straw bans irritate me because they’re such transparent bullshit - and so many people prop it up as actually real, useful, and ‘helping’.
Similar to folks pushing homeopathy as real medicine and getting folks to nod along so they can sell it to even more suckers.
The whole country seems to be devolving to scam artists selling increasingly ridiculous feel good scams to everyone to boost our numbers.
I consider it yet another paper cut in the ongoing erosion of rational thought and pragmatic thinking in the public sphere.
Straw bans alone? Not hurting anyone too bad.
The overall direction is going to get a lot of people killed though.
-The soil quality is going to hell, is it the fault of nitrogen fertilizers? It probably doesnt help, but far worse is the over farming of corn, which is the direct result of farming subsidies that shouldnt exist.
-The chemical train crash in east Palestine Ohio? Operating per EPA regs; a company that had actual liability for harm would never transport chemicals without insurance, and the insurance company would base the rate on everything you would want them too, like installed safety features, rail upkeep, and training; instead, they are off scot free because they are protected by the people who are supposed to regulate them, as is only natural.
-We are decades behind in energy infastructure because of nuclear alarmism.
-Flint was an inside job, the government poisoned the people there and said it was safe.
-I almost forgot paper straws, which are also terrible for the environment and even worse for humans.
-We always ignore the biggest polluter, the pentagon.
I could go on all day. If the EPA set out a few basic guidelines like "hey, make sure people wear respirators!", "dont dump chemicals into the river!", no one would complain. Its just, that will never be the federal government of the united states.
Metal straws are sturdy, but they get uncomfortably hot or cold depending on the drink.
Oh come on. How do you even make that jump?
So it’s an example of illogic to push for banning gas stoves rather than incentivizing proper ventilation.
Gas itself has a lot of problems. Ignoring the safety concerns (oof!), the micro-leaks from gas pipelines is a major source of greenhouse gases. But we can't clean up all the pipes if everyone is still using gas stoves.
I know a lot of people worry about gas, my grandmother wouldn't have it in the house. But is there any solid evidence that it is as dangerous as people think it is? I have been cooking with gas for all my adult life and I'm 68 with no problems whatsoever. And until I left the UK in 1986 we used gas fired central heating and hot water, again with no problems. I don't know anyone personally who has ever had a safety problem with a gas installation.
It's only a 'life pro tip' if you get to keep it. Keep your life, that is.
"The gas may have accumulated at the ceiling, explaining why the resident did not notice it. The explosion was not significant in magnitude. The resident’s hearing had not been damaged. This suggested that the pressure was less than 70 kPa (10 psi) (Bignell 1977). Items were taken from the kitchen of this apartment and tested. Results indicated that these objects had been exposed to pressures of less than 70 kPa (10 psi). The Building Research Station and Imperial College of Lon don performed an extensive battery of tests to discover how much internal force Ronan Point could withstand. The results indicated that the walls could be displaced by a pressure of only 19.3 kPa (2.8 psi) (Levy and Salvadori 1992). It was estimated that the kitchen and living room walls were moved by a pressure of only 1.7 kPa (0.25 psi), while the exterior wall was displaced with a pressure of 21 kPa (3 psi) (Griffiths et al. 1968)." https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
My meter was off the charts when turning on the gas range or oven. I didn't get a meter until after a trip to the in-laws when my wife noticed that cooking at their house didn't make her sick, but as soon as we were back home it was an issue.
We swapped the gas for induction and love it - especially the part where she isn't getting sick from using it. Our house is built very tight. The air quality meter also got me to put in an air exchanger. It was great to have numbers before and after these changes.
We had gas because I've always liked cooking on it and it works when the power is out. It was hard to give that up. Now we use a camp stove when the power is out.
I think a ban is too strong. It seems like building codes requiring a range hood that actually works could be enough.
What else than electricity if used for cooling? Genuine question.
Have you checked for formaldehyde? I did, and a stove results in a real increase in its content.
I wonder how the ancients drank liquids, before the invention of the straw.
https://www.chaldeannews.com/features-1/2019/12/24/history-o...
Of course, back then, their main concern was not to disturb whatever settled on the bottom of the vessel.
The reason why these bans are effective is because people like me don't want a bag anyway, and before these bans were in effect, I didn't have a choice. And these things do not end up in the trash, in part, because they are so light weight.
The same thing happened when they banned smoking. Normalizing not using a bag unless you need one will feel normal for the next generation, but never feel normal for us.
When your concerns about environmentalism extend only to "unless it's inconvenient" then you're not actually concerned with environment, you're concern with feeling socially shamed.
Look, I have plenty of concern about faux environmentalism bullshit, like recycling plastic, but plastic bag bans are not one of them, because there are myriad alternatives that exist.
I’ve found it takes lots of effort. It’s a chore to keep track of and bring it back out to the car. I probably now have 10 reusable bags that I’ve bought because I keep forgetting them at home, or in the car when I wasn’t expecting to go to the store.
It’s not a huge effort, but it’s definitely non-zero.
Obviously, I should be smarter. But I’m not, sadly.
There are plenty of these types of "chores" we accept because they are something we see as worthwhile. Wearing a seat belt, brushing our teeth, stepping outside to smoke a cigarette, putting on headphones to use our phone on the bus, not using a phone in a theater, etc., etc., etc.
When this is normalize, nobody will notice, but the 20 years of transition will be slightly annoying, but my point is that, during that 20 years... we're not even materially changing our behavior. The stores have paper or slightly denser plastic bags for you.
The thing that drives me crazy about this whole debate is how trivial it is. It's effectively the least possible change we can make to substantially change the culture, and very same people seem to claim that it's both (1) not enough change to matter, and (2) so much change that it's harming environmentalism as a cause.
The entire point of doing it this way is behavioral economics. If you make it slightly annoying, most people will eventually change their behavior. The fact that so many people hate such a small change so much is exactly why I point out that the people who care so much about a slight behavioral change don't actually care about environmentalism, is that most folks haven't even begun to gauge the level of cultural change we need to actually fight climate change. If you think being asked to generally keep a grocery bag in your car is too much to ask, just wait until you're "incentivized" to take an ebike to the grocery store... If that's something you can't stomach even if it destroys the climate, then you don't care about the climate.
Stopping smoking isn’t physically difficult. That’s not the part that matters. It’s mentally difficult.
Sure I do sometimes forget to bring my reusable bags, but even environmental reasons aside I hate plastic bags. It makes it harder to carry groceries, where you might have 10-20 bags instead of two big solid bags. They also frequently rip, so you have to pick stuff up and your groceries gets damaged. Then you have to toss all of them (or store them somewhere "in case" where you end up with 100s of them).
I think people like this because it explains why the "other side" doesn't just listen to their arguments and follow their prescriptions on how to live exactly.
Meanwhile, these other people live _in_ the environment, and so they're obviously concerned about it at some level.
My read is that "environmentalism" is used as a "bully plank" and people are rather tired of being manipulated for the ends of elites without any accountability for their policy failures and so generally tend to react quite negatively when it is naively brought into any conversation.
I haven't actually heard anyone complain about it or get annoyed at some group of people - this whole concept of being annoyed at some group of e.g. environmentalists actually seems completely strange and alien.
Yes, it takes a bit of getting used to, but now it's simply a habit to take a small folded up reusable bag most places when we head out (just incase we end up shopping), or to think ahead and grab some bags when we know we're going out for a shop.
Really not a big deal.
Previously, plastic bags discarded roadside were a common sight, stuck in fences and trees.
Even so, the alternatives here in NZ are paper bags or more expensive polyester fabric bags.
For us ADHD people your simple habit is an insurmountable problem. Even if I have them in the car I'll be halfway done with shopping before I remember the bag. Fortunately they just let me pay for a new reusable bag each time.
I resent it because it feels like token bullshit. Plastic bags were quite thin so there is quite literally 100x+ more plastic in the packaging of the products I'm buying than the bag it goes in. Environmentalists pushed the most inconvenient policy that has the least benefit instead of something that might actually move the needle enough to gain my support.
How often do you forget your wallet or phone?
Before I got medicated, I found myself missing something essential multiple times a week. For me, at least, that stopped happening once I got the right dose.
For other things, like tape measures, buy a half dozen. Put them the first place you checked the last time you couldn't find it.
And for people living in the middle of deserts AC is not an option... when you start to cater to every little tantrum of every little human beings we are of course doomed. You have adhd, other are vintage car enthusiast, other love travelling every weekend to barcelona by place, &c.
From a Dannish study
Like quitting smoking, the benefit is not immediately obvious or universally effective (eg quitting at 70), but the benefit is still there.
1. That has to be compared against the pollution involved in making plastic bags, not against nothing at all.
2. Paper bags can use recycled paper, so it’s not really (directly) from trees.
I do agree that some behaviors can be counterproductive, like those pests who blockade busy roads or glue themselves to paintings "for the environment". Not only do these privileged and spoiled punks unjustly impede people from living their lives and destroy culture (they seem to always glue themselves to things that still pass as art, never the banana duct taped to the wall), but they only foment antipathy toward anything environmental, harming legitimate concern, action, and legislation in the process. The social deficits and ineptness of these people is astounding.
Can you provide a source for plastic bag bans having "no actual benefit"? The article is saying the opposite.
Take carbon-neutrality for example. There's no shortage of people who will rage against flyers, car users, cruise takers, etc, etc as the cause of all carbon related ills in the world. And of course, the complainer's personal use of polluting energy is always objectively correct and morally just. And there are extreme examples like the "Tyre Extinguishers" group, which is clearly just a group of individuals who want to damage others' property under some thin veil of "doing good for the environment".
I say all this as a person that actually does care about the environment, but have not fallen into the easy trap of thinking that hating on others is a solution.
Meaningful central solutions are the answer. If one cares about carbon neutrality, I'd recommend advocating for across-the-board carbon taxation that is directly and honestly tied to the cost of fully and immediately offsetting a product/service's carbon footprint. And then it wouldn't matter one bit if someone wants to take several cruises a year, or drive an "unnecessarily" large car. But the social justification to hate on those people would evaporate, and that would make some other people sad.
Smoking or emitting carbon, or using plastic imposes negative externalities on other people. Second hand smoke causes lung cancer, carbon in the atmosphere leads to climate change, plastic in our environment can cause developmental and reproductive issues. There are reasons to oppose these things that do not include hating people. Some of the tactics may be ineffective or misguided, but this does not mean that everyone who cares about stopping harmful things hates a particular group of people.
I like your idea of putting a price on carbon emissions. Many economists agree that it would be one of the most effective ways to eliminate emissions while allowing the economy to continue to grow [1]. Solutions are there, and they will be employed when the political will for it is built.
Please tell me where it's possible to live in modern society right now without any use of polluting energy. Seems to me like https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
> immediately offsetting a product/service's carbon footprint.
What offsetting do you find acceptable? Most carbon offsets sold are complete bunk, thus costing very little. Stuff we can be sure about (like DAC) are well over 500€/ton right now, implemented now this would be sure to lead to riots, especially since it'll probably affect people with less income the most (relative to their income). A carbon price is a great mechanism, but one this high is (IMHO) unworkable and there needs to be accompanying measures to ensure that the carbon price isn't so low as to be ineffective, not strain citizens to much and not make local industry non-competitive.
If we only implemented it for non-strictly-necessary stuff (like meat, flights, big cars, cars outside rural areas, living and heating a larger dwelling over 18°, ), it would still be very unpopular (and probably lead to riots)
Sustainable lifestyles will be much more annoying than quitting plastic bags and straws. If this is the bar we can't overcome we're utterly fucked
My impression is that these laws are often popular among one group because they annoy another, perceived as being in the wrong - which then leads to the second group pushing laws that will annoy the first, even if they don't make sense.
[1] backlash effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash_(sociology)