In what universe is requiring them the only alternative to banning them? The actual alternative is obvious: not banning them.

Taxing them to account for the externalities they bring.

I see no need for a false dichotomy of "require" vs "ban". There aren't laws requiring a state to have lumber mills, or outright banning them. There are many alternatives with a wide spectrum of attributes:

- Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per year, density per area per year).

- Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three paragraphs on its own).

- Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether that's residential areas, parks, you name it.

These are just the first three examples that come to mind, and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up with more.

In free societies, bans should be the last weapon of choice. By default, any activity should be allowed, many of the allowed activies should be regulated and/or taxed, but outright bans should be very well justified.

Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.