I don't think it's deliberate, but it's the kind of "distraction" that can very easily arise organically. "We must do something, this is something we can do, therefore we must do this". Straw bans are something completely trivial that can be done for the environment with almost no pushback (apart from disabled people!). People can then get back in the SUVs while feeling like they've done their Good Deed For The Environment.
I don't understand the mocking. If they would get back in the SUVs anyway, then yes, they did something. Maybe tiny, but at least a part of a wider change. For some that straw, plastic bag, and a keep cup may be the way to start thinking of something bigger. If not, they saved a straw, a bag and a plastic cup - I'm happy they did. (just acknowledge it's a tiny part and move on)
I started using Linux as a better and free system than win95, and only after a while thought about the bigger software freedom issues. Before linux, microsoft was just a random company for me. I am not alone in this respect. And look how far open source has come.
In the same way, straw banning can be a 'gateway drug' to environmental awareness. You've done your bit. So you acknowledged there was something to do. Then you dont want that small bit to be meaningless, so you do a tiny bit more All the while advocating to other people this is a worthy cause. Then you find how bigcorps are flagrantly violating the good cause. Of course this cant be right. And drip by drip you wear down a mountain.
Try swapping out the 'wrong' and 'good' with something else and the reasoning seems far clearer.
"Hey, I've done my two hours of volunteering at the orphanage, now let me go back to running my child sweat shop."
If you feel the scaling is unequal, change it. At any scaling I can imagine the initial reaction to someone seriously holding that view is disbelief and then mocking.
If, in an attempt to lose weight, I drink a can of diet coke instead of regular coke when I eat my daily Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese and Large Fries, some would say either I'm not really trying to lose weight, or I've grievously misunderstood the whole enterprise.
Keeping everything else the same someone who drinks a 24oz Diet Coke vs regular every day ends up ~25 lbs lighter. That’s less obvious if their baseline is 300lbs, but it’s still meaningful 8% of their body weight and a great first step.
Keeping everything else the same is hard with diets, but just cutting soda does seem to have a real impact.
Your point would work better if you said "eat healthily" rather than "lose weight". Because just dropping sugared soda from an already-unhealthy diet is a fantastic weight loss method. :D
A better analogy for the straw is skipping one fry in each meal. Technically that's an improvement, but the amount is negligible and if you act like it made a difference you're more likely to skip opportunities to actually force meaningful change.
Some others would say they understand the challenge of losing weight and the diet coke habit is a great first step! Do you know what you'd like to tackle as the next one?
I lost 10lbs just switching to diet soda. It's definitely not a small change if you're drinking soda often like I was. I eventually moved off of soda entirely.
Why is the straw inherently a problem though? If properly exposed of, there's no issue with them. People who are buying expensive metal straws wouldn't just throw them out in nature anyway, so I'm not seeing how those things solve any problems. Sure, a ban, like you mentioned would keep assholes from littering, so that would help independently.
Edit: Did some googling, and this article sums up my concern nicely:
"Banning straws may confer 'moral license' – allowing companies and their customers to feel they have done their part. The crucial challenge is to ensure that these bans are just a first step."
Any single-use non-degradable object is an issue. It's not as much about throwing individual straws out in nature, but loads of bars/restaurants/cafes, each throwing out hundreds of them a day, every day. Next, we can grab another single-use plastic thing...
Switching to eating a cheese pizza a week in place of a meat meal would do far more for the environment overall and be almost negligible for most people yet no one really does it because it's hard to virtue signal that.
