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.