[jbob2000]

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.

[ekiru]

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.