Regarding nitrogen oxide, the California Air Resources Board figures that using a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much as driving a Toyota Camry from Los Angeles to Denver. Of course, gas-powered leaf blowers also spew climate-wrecking CO2, but their nitrogen oxide emissions have an outsized climate impact: the EPA estimates that one pound of nitrous oxide has almost 300 times as much global warming effect as a pound of carbon dioxide.
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People use leaf blowers, blasting air at up to 280 miles an hour, to remove tree leaves, with the ultimate goal of keeping their lawns looking neat. But leaf litter is habitat for worms and insect larvae. Leaf blowers are just one reason the total biomass of insects on the planet is declining by about 2 percent per year. Leaf litter also protects and builds topsoil, of which we’re losing tens of billions of tons per year globally. So, we’re using noisy, polluting machines to do things that, in many cases, we really shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
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Then there’s the problem of economic inequality. Who actually uses leaf-blowers? In most cases, it’s low-income landscape workers, who are exposed to the air pollution and noise from leaf blowers at close range over sustained periods of time. Gas-powered lawn care has been linked to debilitating health issues like cancer, asthma, heart disease, and hearing loss; so, unsurprisingly, it’s the less-well-off who face the brunt of those health insults.
Stepping back, we see this general pattern reflected in the rest of industrial society: just as leaf-blower noise and air pollution gets shunted mostly toward low-paid landscape workers, resource extraction and polluting industries tend to be located near marginalized communities, nationally and globally. Therefore, the leaf blower just binds us more strongly to already unfair and dangerous social trends.
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The only way to avoid those ill effects would be simply to use less energy—which means doing less with machines, and more with human hands and feet. This is why electric cars are not as much of a solution to climate change as the simple overall reduction of powered transport.
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But, back to the leaf blower. Why make such a big deal over so small a problem? Compared to the existential predicaments we humans face (including climate change, hyper-partisan politics fueled by spiraling economic inequality and social media algorithms, nuclear weapons, and “forever chemicals” disrupting human and animal reproduction), the gasoline-powered leaf blower is just an annoyance. Why not just use the electric blower and leave it at that? After all, it’s better than the gas version.
Sorry, I can’t stop there. Call it the curse of knowing too much. Yes, Janet and I will keep using our electric blower where raking is impractical. But every time I pick up the machine, I’m reminded that our society’s overall socio-economic model is unsustainable and anti-life. We need far, far more than a green energy retrofit. We need an entirely different way of existing on this unique, imperiled planet—a way that many Indigenous people are still familiar with.
Buying an electric leaf blower was an interesting experiment that we may not repeat. I’m glad we kept our rake. It gets a lot more use.
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