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I'd argue the opposite. Gas-powered leaf blowers are insanely pollutant. Running a gas leaf blower for an hour is equivalent to driving a car for 100 miles [1]

• dmurray 5y ago
  Nope. What the study actually says [0] is that it's equivalent in production of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. PAH is a category of emission at which two-stroke oil-burning engines are disproportionately bad, and modern cars are reasonably good. If we measured on another axis (say, rubber particles), we could write a headline that cars are 1000 times worse polluters than leaf blowers. Like, leaf blowers aren't great for the environment, and maybe mandating catalytic converters for them would improve air quality, but these specific claims are all made in bad intellectual faith. [0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.h...
  • Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I'm not sure how you can call a criticism of two-stroke engine PAH emissions in "intellectual bad faith". Is the title hyperbolic? Yes. But in bad faith? Against what? Few other uses of two-strokes are as popular by Americans by far.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  I can’t find a citation there for an hour of gas leaf blowing being 100 miles of car driving. What I can find there is an hour of lawn mowing being comparable to 100 miles of car travel. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.h... an hour of leaf blowing is probably worse, but that study is silent on the topic. (It’s also likely that far more hours of lawn mowing than leaf blowing is done in aggregate.)