[ethanbond]

These sorts of comments are so deeply discrediting to the green movement.

We need to focus our dialogue on big problems where small changes yield huge environmental results (like transportation and meat production) rather than small problems where even outright perfection (100% of people wearing glasses, no one using these drops) does literally nothing for the outcomes we care about.

If plastics is the thing you care about (which is completely reasonable), we should be approaching as how to produce better plastics with less environmentally harmful production and discard. Choosing not to make this particular object or that particular object is simply not going to move the needle.

[clairity]

yes, that's been california 'environmental' policy in a nutshell: take the smallest problem, pass an uncritical law based on manufactured sentiment, back-slap all around, and put hat in hand to elicit political reward. plastic bag bans, lawn watering restrictions, prop 65 warnings, bike lanes to nowhere, even leafblower bans (as much as i hate the pollution i endure from these twice a week) are all examples of empty feel-good legislation.

it avoids taking actual political risk and spending real political capital on things that matter (and against moneyed interests) while still reaping political rewards. (this is incidentally why i've started to think that we should be able to vote 'null' for a given office, meaning no one should be in it for the upcoming term.)