Among those for whom yardwork and household maintenance are services to be contracted out, a movement toward making that labor marginally more difficult for those contractors is gaining steam. Too many of America’s most twee, upscale municipalities have gone to war with efficient appliances. Ann Arbor, Mich., is only the latest. But the city’s officials innovated in their effort to retail their provincial preferences as something nobler by road-testing a new narrative: The leaf blowers are trying to kill you.
“We have a very aggressive climate action goal: carbon neutrality by 2030 citywide, and, obviously, gas-powered equipment in the city isn’t going to help us meet that goal,” said Ann Arbor City Council member Jen Eyer. Beyond the arbitrary and capricious “carbon neutrality” goals, the council cited all the usual dubious justification for its 10–0 vote banning gasoline-powered blowers by January 2028 (with a partial ban on their use between June and September taking effect immediately). They’re noisy. They pollute. They project dust and debris, as the designation “blower” would suggest. But, perhaps unsatisfied with these rationales, the city’s residents have felt compelled to innovate a new one.
The poor souls who are compelled by unjust historical circumstances to wield these dangerous contraptions are being subjected to undue risk, one prominent Ann Arbor resident complained. Lawn-care professionals will be “happy to not be abused by having to wear gasoline backpacks and be endangered every day,” said former council member Joan Lowenstein.
Lowenstein’s conception of herself and her former colleagues as saviors exists independent of the opinions of the people she is committed to saving. “We use high-end gas power leaf blowers on almost every single job site that we go to,” one panicked lawncare specialist told ABC News. “They’re used for things such as cleaning up after mowing, cleaning up grass clippings, doing leaf clean up, and cleaning up any landscaping material debris.”
Only those who do not perform their own outdoor maintenance need to be informed of the value proposition represented by gas-powered, two-stroke engines: They work.
Beyond their efficiency, they’re also cheaper. “Our gas-powered equipment blows at about 220 mph and an electric is going to be about half that, if that, with a 10–20-minute battery life,” the troubled groundskeeping specialist observed, “and that’s a $1,500 blower machine.” He added that, while there may be commercially available alternatives to gasoline-fueled outdoor tools by 2028 that perform as well as their competitors, no such alternative exists today. With a pen stroke, the city council replaced a regime that functions with one that does not.
The hyperbole to which crusaders against efficient appliances appeal is necessary to raise the stakes on what are, in essence, their personal pet peeves. It’s a phenomenon I described in a June article for National Review: “The War on Things That Work.”
The machines intrude upon “the lovely sounds of spring, summer, and fall,” according to USA Today contributor Ellie Gruber. They kick up “disease-causing mold and fecal matter” at “200 miles per hour,” per the editorial writers at the Maryland Daily Record. They menace the already marginalized migrant laborers who landscape the locals’ yards “with leaf blowers just inches from their lungs and ears,” the author Michael Shapiro told the California paper the Press Democrat. Insisting that his neighbors “use rakes” instead, the author exposed the pretextual nature of his concern for yard workers. Suddenly, the neighborhood was once again a placid place “where we could hear ourselves think, listen to birds sing and enjoy the sound of our neighbors playing Mozart.”
These are, however, rare and ill-advised spasms of candor from the anti-efficiency activists. More often, they inadvertently expose their own insecurity by festooning their personal predilections with grandiose appeals to the greater good of the human species.
They vastly overstate the emissions produced by small engines. They wildly overestimate the capabilities of electric alternatives. They appear to have no conception of the material and energy inputs necessary to make a lithium-ion battery, nor are they acquainted with what becomes of those power cells when they reach the end of their life cycle. And, perhaps most insultingly, they insist that their efforts to make the work of lawn-care professionals harder and more expensive – outputs that translate to higher costs for consumers – are actually a form of altruism. Then they have the gall to insist that anyone who objects to their efforts is an unenlightened troglodyte.
What the anti-efficiency set really wants is to preserve all the bucolic placidity of suburban life without the menace of the tools that carve bucolic placidity out of the wilderness. That is understandable, but it’s also irrational. What’s more, we would regard it as irrational if it wasn’t dressed up with high-strung, garment-rending nonsense. And we’re forced to endure this sturm und drang just to make imperious busybodies feel better about their own parochialism. If this is to become a contest between these two competing irritations, I’ll take the leaf blowers.