Get your head out of your ass. This is a gift to the oil industry and destroys the environment. There are new biodegradable straws that are 100% as good as plastic and won’t wind up embedded in sea life.
This would work itself out over time. No one likes soggy straws. It's actually caused some innovation. They have straws made from plants now that aren't too bad.
At this point, switching to plastic straws feels like such a reprieve. Can we keep him focused on little annoyances like this? Or making him hysterical that the 7-11 ran out of Cheetos?
My issue here is him just decreeing anything he wants whenever he wants and that seems to just be accepted. My guess is he's annoyed that people are saying Musk is president so he issued a decree to remind people that he is king, but why is this being tolerated at all?
My only complaint on some of the ones that I have used is that when they break, they can be pretty sharp. Doesn't really matter to me because I am an adult and don't have a habit of cheating on straws. But I could see that being an issue for kids.
Or just don't use straws if you don't have a reason too. I can see when you have a fountain soda whilst on the road but not too often outside of that (yes, I am aware there are medical reasons but that is few and far between for most of us).
I've read that paper straws are lined with plastic, specifically PFAS, since paper will naturally fall apart in water. A thin lining if plastic is technically less plastic, but if it's PFAS then IMO it's just worse than a 100℅ plastic straw.
I doubt they are lined with plastic because they absolutely do fall apart. They last about five minutes before they start to fall apart. Paper straws are nothing new. My parents grew up with them.
I will say that my experience with paper straws has been pretty disappointing. They're...usable, but a considerably-worse experience if you're nursing a drink all day. They get soggy and tend to collapse. They get started on biodegrading a lot more-quickly than I'd like.
I think that maybe a better answer than "use paper" is "use plastic that biodegrades in a shorter period of time than existing plastic straws".
Like, I don't really care about the wall thickness of my straw. I don't need a lot of flexibility. I'm okay with paying more for straws, as they're pretty cheap. Straws that are shipped in paper wrappers, as is generally the case here in restaurants, don't need UV light resistance. I'd think that somewhere out there, there's a plastic that trades off some of those properties to be long-term biodegradable.