Your Next Culture War Battlefront: Leaf Blowers
Fuck that noise, as it were.
We’d like to welcome you to the next squirmish in the never-ending culture wars, since the proposition that fossil fuels cause global warming has over the last few decades become not a matter of scientific fact but rather a divisive partisan opinion. Last week, the City Council of Portland, Oregon, voted to phase out gasoline-powered leaf blowers by 2028. The ordinance was co-written by Multnomah County, which has also promised to help small and minority-owned businesses transition to electric lawncare tools.
The phase-out will launch in January 2026. For the first two years, gas leaf blowers will be prohibited for nine months out of the year – between January and September – and their use will be allowed during the wet leaf season from October to December.
The year-round ban will start on Jan. 1, 2028.
With the new law, Portland will join over 100 cities and the whole damn states of California and Colorado in restricting the use of guzzle-ine powered leaf blowers or banning their sale or use altogether.
Such bans have picked up steam, or revved up their electric motors, in recent years, driven by research like this October 2023 report which found that running a gas leaf blower for an hour emits pollutants equivalent to driving a late-model midsize car about 1,100 miles, or a drive from Portland to San Diego — or Los Angeles to Denver if you prefer. Pick your own pollutant itinerary. The California Air Resources Board uses that figure as well, as well as pointing out that taken all together, “small off-road-engines” of the kind used in lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and other tools produce about 20 percent of the emissions that cause summertime smog in the state.
In addition to all that pollution, the US Centers for Disease Control points out that many gas leaf blowers are noisy enough to damage hearing, at over 85 decibels.
The Oregonian explains that enforcement of the new law will aim at “property owners who use leaf blowers or who hire contractors who use them” rather than at the businesses themselves, and we figure Fox News should have a field day with the explanation:
“The reason for this is to ensure that small businesses and landscape workers, especially those from marginalized communities, don’t bear the brunt of enforcement,” Sonrisa Cooper, the Sustainable Economy and Just Transition Analyst at the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, told the City Council. “The onus is on the property owner to ensure that gas leaf blowers aren’t used on their property.”
See? Oregon wokesters hate private property! And yes indeedy: Fox News did highlight that in its coverage of the proposal earlier this month, although it surprisingly didn’t sneer at it. That’s just the website, though; the on-air staff will doubtless get to that.
That said, it’s hardly a crazy point; as this 2023 op-ed from the Virginia Mercury reminds readers, some 44 percent of landscaping workers in the US are Hispanic or Latino, employers may or may not provide ear protection, and even with earplugs, the workers are around that nasty exhaust from those two-stroke engines most of the workday. As much of 30 percent of that exhaust is unburned fuel going right into the air.
More broadly, Fox and other righty voices have taken to condemning leaf-blower bans; a story last month on Colorado’s law, which bans the use of gas-powered lawncare equipment on state property only (FOR NOW), framed the law as “part of the climate crusade,” because how ridiculous, and a much more overtly hostile January story on California’s phase-out of gas leaf blowers claims that Californians just hate the oppression, citing a guy named Ken who said, “It sounds like pandering to a base,” and that the regulation “creates a false sense of security," although if he specified what that’s supposed to mean, the article didn’t quote him.
The piece does quote one former landscaper, Richard, who said he only uses battery-powered lawn equipment, because “They're lighter. They're easier to maintain. If you have the appropriate number of batteries and supplies … I don't see any problem with it.”
Also, a guy named Steve thought that “for some uses, some niche cases, electric things are fantastic, but in the case of these high-powered quick uses,” heck nah. And then a guy named Travis said he believed that producing batteries still involves creating pollution, so you need to ask “which one's more beneficial long-term.” (Batteries are. By miles and miles. Especially when charged using renewable sources.)
Not surprisingly, red states are now looking at protecting the sacred right to spew pollution and wake up everyone in the neighborhood at first light, especially if it owns the libs. Georgia came close last year to passing a bill that would’ve prohibited cities from limiting or banning gas leaf blowers, but legislators couldn’t find a way to reconcile the House and Senate versions before the end of the session. They plan to try again this year.
And in Florida, the Lege is gearing up for a fight to ban cities from enacting any restrictions or bans on gas leaf blowers, even though several municipalities have already enacted them. On Leap Day this year, the state Senate passed a prohibition on both new and existing leaf blower bans, without bothering to hear public comments because that would just make people think they’d be listened to.
The bill was introduced by Republican state Sen. Jason Brodeur, the knucklefuck who has previously introduced bills to require state registration of bloggers as “lobbyists” and to make it easy to use state libel law to bankrupt reporters who write about “discrimination” if a good ol’ boy was just funnin’ (we are paraphrasing heavily).
Brodeur was apparently upset in February when the city of Winter Park considered a gas leaf-blower ban, and only withdrew a proposed bill when the city agreed to put the measure to a public vote. But then on February 29, the day after Winter Park agreed, Brodeur’s bill was rapidly re-introduced and passed, haha, take that, libs and greenies!
The measure was inserted into a state budget bill, and still needs approval from Gov. Ron DeSantis, who probably is looking forward to another chance to make Floridian lives shittier.
MORE ON THIS AND OTHER TOPICS!
[Oregonian / Portland leaf blower ordinance / Fox News / Fox News / Tampa Bay Times / 11Alive News]
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The same fucks who are banning leaf bans are also going to be the same people who are first in line for the Roomba yardbots, mowing and edging automatically, electrically, with no smell and low noise. Then they're going to yell at their neighbours for making noise at 9:30AM on a Saturday when they pull out the gas mowers that these fucks banned banning.
The ultimate source of all the evil is, of course, the lawn -- or perhaps the perception of what a lawn is supposed to be. The high expectation that lawn, in all seasons, is to be lush, green, perfectly trimmed, and absolutely free of natural debris and any plant species other than the dominant grass.
It takes a lot of effort and care to achieve this state of turfed bliss. But Americans work now more hours than before the advent of "labor-saving" automation, and those who don't wouldn't know a adze from a mattock. So, they apply those quintessentially American easy solutions: Money, somebody else's labor, and petrochemical fuels and fertilizers.
All that to create was is essentially a labor-intensive, high-engineered monocultural farm that produces one crop -- grass clippings. Which are a waste product. Typically, workers are hired to put these into plastic bags which end up, at further expense, entombed with municipal refuse in a impermeably lined sanitary landfill ... where they remain, and this is a rough estimate, forever.
The pollution outputs from this folly: Air pollution, noise pollution, water pollution.
Wasted resources include the petroleum lubricants and oil (or electrical energy), work time and (AND!) the precious DRINKING WATER that is used to irrigate most of the residential lawns in the United States.
(That last one, in future drought years, will be considered by our descendants as a horrific crime.)
All to get a lawn meant to be superior to the "visual pollution" of wild natural plant growth.
While leaf blower bans are a good, they are meaningless. Again, in the best American tradition, the idea is a technical fix where an adaptive fix is required.
An analogy: A leaf blower ban is to the true cause of the need for a leaf blower as bypass graft surgery is to coronary artery disease. After a CABG, you technically no longer have heart disease. Poof, gone. But what contributed to that heart disease (smoking, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, genetic predisposition, etc.) are still there. Did you really "cure" your heart disease if you don't adapt who you are to way of life that doesn't cause you heart disease?
The leaf blower ban is a classic American idea that adopting, or switching technologies, means change will be easy -- that it won't require any pain or any loss. IOW, we have have both! We can have both our five-a-week Polish Boy habit and no clogged coronary arteries -- or have our leaf-free lawn and still pay someone else starvation wages to make the leaves go away. (the worker needs powered leaf blowing tech because they have to clean a lot of lawns to make enough money to maintain one of their favorite things -- living indoors and eating at least once a day.)
Look, I'm not saying banning gas-powered leaf blowers is a waste of effort. It is not. The noise alone is reason to ban the motherfuckers. Ban them. Hard. With prejudice.
But, going all-electric (and irrigating with rainwater or recycled "greywater") is no *true* solution --- the irrational desire for a clean, monotonous lawn -- (in all seasons!) remains. Just like the heart patient continuing to feed his addiction to kielbasa hoagies, the root cause is remains, and its ill effects never truly go away. Our technical solution was (comparatively) easy. But short-lived and short-sighted.
The harder thing, the 'belling the cat' as it were, of this issue is getting rid of the very idea of The American Lawn. Or at least, getting rid of the high status value and social expectations Americans place upon it.
Basically, among a wide band of the American Civilization, a lawn is a good thing to waste time, money, and water on. It's a good thing worthy of making the air slightly polluted and the water slightly polluted water. Oh, an the economy a little less just.
But won't the neighbors be jealous! Or, won't the HOA stay off my back. Or, my HOA fee pays for it, and I don't really make any decisions of that type for my community so I'm not a silent collaborator in all this awfulness which is neatly hidden by the social and economic constructs of modern American capitalism (ie, "The lawn guys come when I'm away. What I don't see doesn't exist. So, therefore it's not a problem, or at least not my problem.")
It just seems so silly to get worked up about how people care for their lawns. But the American lawn, in its cool quiet, is noisy battleground. For the future of the planet, for the future of the species, for the very concept of what is just.
"Leaves of Grass," indeed.