Personally I don't drive so that doesn't really apply to me.

> If silicon straws are better, why don’t more people use them? I would posit that they’re not actually better, otherwise we’d see more widespread adoption.

This is a very poor argument, it's essentially the same as an appeal to the natural "X is older than Y thus X must be better than Y" - in this thread we're discussing straw usage from an American perspective where disposable plastics is the norm - stating that disposable plastics should continue to be the norm because they're currently the norm isn't very interesting. It's similar to the argument that we should never have switched off of leaded gasoline since everyone was fine with using leaded gasoline.

"Personally I don't drive so that doesn't really apply to me."

It would apply to everyone if you got your ban on plastic straws. People would switch to straws that were stiffer and made from alternative materials, sometimes using metal ones. They would be at higher risk of suffering an injury because of a ban.

And you would be at risk, too, because I'm certain that as someone with an internet connection, you frequently ride in a car, or use public transportation, or utilize some other form of transit that goes faster than a walking pace. Those same risks apply to you in those situations if there's an accident and you're drinking through a metal straw.

"...disposable plastics should continue to be the norm because they're currently the norm..."

That is not the argument I made. It is a strawman you raised to avoid answering my question. You were promoting silicon straws as superior, and I raised the question that, if they are so superior, why haven't they supplanted plastic straws?

We got rid of leaded gasoline because it was incompatible with catalytic converters required for tailpipe emissions. It's arguable that we might still be using it if it weren't for the Clean Air regulations. Avgas still contains lead because unleaded fuel is hard on engines, and in applications that require critical reliability, such as aircraft engines, switching to unleaded is a risk we're not willing to accept from a regulatory standpoint.

And more to your point, the car enthusiasts I work with lament the days of leaded gas. They have restored classic cars from the 50's and 60's and they've had to modify their engines to work with unleaded gasoline.

Your desire to paint plastic straws or leaded gas as unalloyed evils is, quite simply, ignorant. Everything involves tradeoffs. Sometimes the tradeoff is pretty clear. But sometimes, it isn't. For you to pretend like it's a simple or easy thing to make the tradeoff choice for everyone on planet earth makes me think you're an idiotic little tyrant, to be quite frank.