'Hi, I'm a Leaf Blower.'

In the Wall Street Journal’s excellent Weekend Review section, Jason Gay gives us the voice we haven’t heard from: that of the leaf blower itself. (Just to be sure: It’s a satirical column.)

Sample:

I’m writing this because me and my leaf blower buddies are feeling beaten up. It’s clear we’re power tool enemy No. 1. Everyone’s decided that we’re a big crisis in society. We’re neck and neck with Facebook. We’re taking more grief than Aaron Rodgers….

First of all, to clarify: I’m electric. I’m noisy, but I’m not as horrible for the environment as a gas blower. I agree with the critics who say that gas blowers need to go. They should go. Gas blowers are blowhards. It’s like having a cable news host living in your garage.

Well done, and very much worth reading.

DC's Sustainable Energy Utility offers financial support for the change to electric equipment

From the DCSEU site.

This qualifies as big news. Washington D.C.’s Sustainable Energy Utility has announced a program to speed and ease the transition away from gas-powered leaf blowers, as mandated by D.C. law.

The program offers $75 for commercial operators, and $50 for residential customers, to help them comply with the law, which takes effect on January 1, 2022.

Details here. Congratulations and thanks to DCSEU.

'Blown Away': Another Set of Powerful Essays

A headline from NJ.Com. In New Jersey, they believe in getting right to the point.

Here are several more samples of writing about the two-stroke engine issue, from the local press.

First: In the Altavista Journal, in Virginia, columnist Lynda Pinto-Torres has a new essay worth reading. It is called “Blown Away. A sample:

In addition to its noxious fumes, leaf blowers also churn up dust which contains a smorgasbord of harmful chemicals and organic material that can cause or exacerbate medical maladies. Also, without leaves, insects—whose numbers are already in decline from loss of habitat—have fewer safe places to ride out the winter.

And then there’s the noise. 

Second, an essay from two years ago, worth re-upping because of its trademark Garden State directness. It is an editorial from the Star-Ledger editorial board, available on NJ.Com, and its headline conveys its point: “No place in civilized society for gas-powered leaf-blowers.”

Here is a sample:

Let's clear the air once and for all about leaf-blowers, and remind ourselves why they belong in the pantheon of yard waste.

They shatter domestic tranquility like a box of nails being poured onto a glass coffee table. They stir up a dusty miasma of poisons. The engine emissions of the two-stroke, gas-powered variety are enough to choke a medium-sized city. And, more than likely, they make your neighbor take exception to the way your face is arranged.

Third is another editorial on NJ.Com, from this past spring. Its title is also wonderfully direct: “Grab a rake. Gas-powered leaf blowers are a public menace.” Sample:

Any community that wishes to prohibit these repulsive machines by whatever degree it considers practical should be encouraged, because there is real science that supports such a ban.

Start with the noise: The uniquely-irritating scream of a gas-powered leaf blower from 50 feet away is up to 80 decibels – four times the noise level of speech. For the person operating the blower, the noise is 95 to 115 decibels, which is torture-level volume. The low-frequency noise penetrates walls of homes far easier than passing vehicles, but you already know that if you ever tried to read, converse, or think when one is in operation nearby.

Then there is the pollution, which is so severe, the two-stroke engine has been regulated out of existence for other uses in the developed world, particularly in parts of Asia.

Congrats and thanks to all these writers and publications.

'Let the Leaves Be': Two Powerful Newspaper Editorials

Two relevant items from the day’s news:

The first is the New York Times print version of Margaret Renkl’s powerful essay about the environmental and human damage wrought by leaf blowers. We mentioned its appearance online yesterday. Today it ran as the lead editorial for the entire newspaper. You can see how it was presented below, and read it here.

Main editorial page of the New York Times, October 26, 2021.

The second was an also-eloquent essay in the Stamford Advocate, in Connecticut, by noted biology professor Jason Munshi-South. Its title is “Turn off the leaf blower and let the leaves be this fall.” You can read it here; a sample is below.

Now imagine [an autumn] scene disrupted by the banshee screams and whines of gas-powered leaf blowers, blasting any ears nearby with excessive noise and poisoning lungs with raw exhaust from burning a mixture of gasoline and motor oil. Bills for hundreds of dollars then arrive in mailboxes all over the neighborhood for the so-called “Fall Cleanup,” when every leaf is blasted away and every last stem is cut to the ground in our gardens. This cost on our pocketbooks, environment, and health is unnecessary, and even counterproductive. All of us should consider leaving the leaves and other plant material in our gardens this autumn!

That layer of fallen leaves in our garden beds protects plant roots over the winter, and provides valuable shelter for bumblebees and other insects that burrow in the ground. If not cut down, many plant stems provide hollow tunnels for insects, or places for the chrysalis of butterflies and moths to ride out the winter. Dried seed heads such as those on coneflowers or black-eyed susans are valuable food for goldfinches and other birds. Waiting for the warmth of spring before removing these materials gives insects a chance to emerge before new plant growth.

Congratulations and thanks to these writers and their publications.

'A Category of Environmental Hell All Its Own'

In an opinion column in today’s New York Times, writer Margaret Renkl, whose latest book is Graceland, at Last, writes about what obsolete gas-powered machinery has done to human, animal, and plant-world welfare, and to the overall state of the environment.

Sample:

They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.

Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry.

Very much worth reading in detail. Congratulations and thanks to Margaret Renkl.

By the way, below you see the online headline for the column. The Times editors assumed all readers would be aware that the line is taken from a famous comment in Shakespeare’s Henry VI: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

'If a Genie Gave me Three Wishes....'

Lawn crew using battery blowers in Washington DC. Soon this will be the only legal form of such equipment in the nation’s capital. (QCDC photo.)

Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. This week she wrote about the new legislation that will ultimately ban two-stroke gas-powered equipment across the state. More about the California law is here:

Here is how Abcarian begins her column:

If a genie gave me three wishes, I swear I would ask for world peace, universal healthcare and the demise of gas-powered leaf blowers.

Like so many people, I work at home. I don’t have a gardener, but I am surrounded by neighbors who do. And every week, without fail, their men arrive armed with leaf blowers, swinging them like, um, elephant trunks and shattering my nerves

And it continues strong from there — including the background on Los Angeles’s experience in having introduced such a ban “too soon.” It was applied back in the 1990s, before battery-powered equipment became a plausible alternative. Now battery equipment is not just “plausible” but the obvious destined winner in this field.

Abcarian’s article is called “Add this to the list of things I’ll never miss: The gas-powered leaf blower.“ It’s worth reading in full.

This is Big: California Prepares for Ban on Gas-Powered Equipment

Here is the beginning of a news story this past weekend by Phil Willon in the Los Angeles Times:

SACRAMENTO —

California will outlaw the sale of new gas-powered lawnmowers, leaf blowers and chainsaws as early as 2024 under a new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday.

The law requires all newly sold small-motor equipment primarily used for landscaping to be zero-emissions — essentially to be battery operated or plug-in — by that target date or as soon as the California Air Resources Board determined it is feasible. New portable gas-powered generators also must be zero-emissions by 2028, which also could be delayed at the discretion of the state agency.

This is obviously a very important development—and not just because of California’s enormous scale.

As a legal matter, California is in a category of its own when it comes to regulating sources of air pollution. Under the Clean Air Act of 1970, standard-setting powers for air quality are reserved to the federal government (rather than cities or states). Mostly this means the Environmental Protection Agency. But because California had already imposed more aggressive standards, in response to its extreme smog problems, the 1970 law gave it special treatment. That unique status allows California to enact laws like this latest one.

(In the rest of the country, the air-quality improvements from phasing out two-stroke equipment may be recognized as a benefit of shifting to battery-powered machinery. But the legal basis for the change must be something else, especially noise effects. The background is explained here and here. )

Because California’s market is so huge, for cars and everything else, in practical terms this provision has made California the national pace-setter in air-quality and environmental standards. If auto-makers are producing cars clean enough to meet California’s standards, they will be selling those cars in all the other states.

This latest move should jump-start the market for battery-powered equipment, which in turn should become more available and affordable everywhere else.

Here is bonus hypocritical-argument point: Some critics of the California law argued that it will be an unfair burden on minority-group members of lawn crews, or owners of lawn companies. On the contrary, as spelled out here, it’s a way to protect these same people from the prolonged exposure to damaging fumes and noise they now endure.

In the Wall Street Journal: 'Here’s Why Leaf Blowers Are Evil Incarnate'

In this space we try to concentrate on the practical, the evidence-based, the scientific.

But today in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Kris Frieswick swings for the fences. Here’s a sample:

Leaf blowers evolved from farm equipment and burst into popular usage in the late 1970s. I was a child in the pre-leaf-blower 1970s. I don’t remember there being an annual, autumn crisis in which layers upon layers of fallen leaves covered every single square inch of suburban America, halting all commerce and transport, because there was NO POSSIBLE WAY to get rid of them.

That’s because we had rakes!

We used the rakes to gather all those leaves up and put them in bags to take to the dump. Or we burned them. It took hours. It got us out of the house (parental bonus). It exhausted us and we didn’t bicker or squabble and fell asleep promptly after dinner. Plus raking leaves was fun, mostly. We created enormous mounds of leaves. We jumped in them…

But, today… we certainly can’t ask hardworking parents to spend a few hours outdoors on lawn maintenance when there are weekend century bike rides and golf outings and tennis and spa days and an endless litany of children’s team sporting events to attend both far and wide. Clearly, leaf blowers are the only possible way to deal effectively with fallen leaves.

You can (and should) read the whole thing here.

The Change Continues

The ECHO company announces a new battery line-up. Sample:

As battery powered growth continues to soar, we wanted to give customers a superior option,” said John Powers, director of product management. “With a full lineup of 10 new units spanning the range of users from high-end homeowners up to professional landscapers and arborists, the 56V e-Force platform delivers the performance that users have come to expect from the ECHO brand."

it’s happening.

The Battery Revolution Continues to Speed Up

Headline on an AP story in the Washington Post.

Headline on an AP story in the Washington Post.

Why focus on batteries on this site? Because the shift away from primitive, hyper-polluting two-stroke gas engines relies on affordable, efficient battery-powered alternatives. Also because advances in battery technology are happening almost every day.

A sample of recent press coverage:

On a separate but related theme, please see “Hearing Too Much in a Noisy World,” by Nina Kraus in the Wall Street Journal. It’s on the subtle but undeniable toll that increasing noise imposes on individuals and society. Sample:

“A constant low-level barrage of meaningless sound is demonstrably bad for any brain, but it is especially devastating for a developing brain….

“Having our hearing always “on” is fatiguing for the brain, especially when the background noise is unimportant but unrelenting. A 1975 study furnished the stark example of an elementary school in New York City that on one end abutted a busy elevated subway track. Reading scores of children in classrooms on the noisy side of the school lagged behind those of their peers on the quiet side by up to 11 months. Mitigation efforts, including rubber rail padding and noise abatement materials in the affected classrooms, erased the learning gap.”

There’s another “mitigation effort” that can make an enormous difference—and that the battery revolution is bringing within reach. That step is eliminating some of the loudest, dirtiest pieces of machinery that now distort life in many neighborhoods.