Comment by ekiru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekiru | Hacker News Reader

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> How hard is it to carry a metal straw with you? You hear news about the ban, and you put a couple plastic ones in your bag until the metal one from amazon arrives.

Metal straws are dangerous due to for many disabled people due to the risk of injuring themselves by biting down involuntarily because of the same disabilities which necessitate their use of straws in the first place. For many others, the inflexibility of metal straws mean that they do not actually enable them to drink independently.

> Why are people so helpless? Jesus christ, it takes half a second to figure out this solution for yourself.

It is indeed very easy to think of this approach. For people with disabilities which make metal straws unusable or dangerous, it probably doesn't take very long to think of why it isn't a solution for them.

(As a minor aside, as a person lacking any such disability: metal straws can be quite a painful experience with hot beverages. Although I'm given to understand that it's traditional in Argentina with mate, and my Argentine in-laws seemed much more comfortable doing so at a higher temperature than I was, so I guess it is probably possible to get used to that.)

If we were to answer every use case every time we need to make a societal change, then nothing would get done.

The scope of people you mention with that disability is very very small. And still, they could work around metal by using a piece of rubber on the tip. Hell, someone could invent a special straw just for disabled people (we could make it longer and more flexible, you might call it a tube!).

Instead of ripping apart my lay ideas and complaining about our attempts at fixing climate change, perhaps we ought to be thinking of better solutions for our friends with disabilities. Because ultimately, climate change will take the lives of people with disabilities before it takes the lives of able-bodied people.

Any issue can be explained away by claiming it is "very very small" - including the matter of straws. I'm skeptical that use of plastic straws by developed countries will ultimately cause enough climate change to kill disabled people as your comment implies. Let's not confuse litter and climate change. That kind of hyperbole does not help.

Environmentalism would be better served if environmentalists focused on deeper solutions and did not waste societal attention and resources on distractions of negligible outcome. Black-and-white thinking and choosing to die on every hill only serves to breed false self-satisfaction and alienate potential supporters.

Totally fair, it was a hyperbolic comment. But environmentalism takes many small steps to achieve, it’s not done overnight in one fell swoop. If we fight all of these small steps, then it never moves forward. We need to “die on this hill” so that we don’t die on a bigger hill much later.

We need to think about a world without throw-away plastic. Banning plastic straws is an exploration in to that world. If it turns out that there is absolutely no way to live in a world without plastic straws, then I am sure the ban will be undone. But I think we can get ahead of this challenge, it’s not that big.

A better approach compared to banning things currently needed by disabled people and then, once disabled people object, saying "well, we need to develop better alternatives for disabled people, but we can't let these issues get in the way" would be to first develop alternatives and then, once there are good alternatives that are actually usable and safe for disabled people, ensuring their availability as part of the same policies that reduce or eliminate the use of the environmentally problematic things.

There's no reason why the needs of disabled people must conflict with taking care of the environment. The apparent conflict in this situation was introduced because people developed their environmental policy proposals without any awareness of or care for the interests and needs of disabled people: if we do not account for the effects of policies on disabled people when deciding which policies to prioritize and how to implement them, some policies will look artificially more appealing because of our inattention to some of their costs and the policies we do choose to pursue will end up implemented in needlessly harmful ways simply because we weren't paying attention to whether we ended up causing harm to some people.

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