I was reading "Natural Home" magazine in a waiting room the other day. It's a slick publication full of articles like "Our Favorite 10 Green Gifts" and "Simplify, Redesign, Go Green". In general it purports to show you how to lower the environmental impact of your life and home, albeit it in a rather yuppie-oriented way that usually seems to involve buying expensive, nice-looking things.
Anyway, flipping through the pages, I came across this sidebar tidbit which instantly puzzled me:
This
says that the leaf-blower emits 513 times more carbon, per hour of use, than the car. And it
implies that this is carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas which is usually under consideration when people talk about "carbon emissions" and "carbon footprint".
But neither of these is remotely true. Machines are not magical carbon-creating devices. You can't produce more carbon from a combustion process than you put in as fuel. If the blower emitted 513 times the carbon per hour as the car, it would be using 513 times the gas. You would need roughly an 80 gallon tank just to run the thing for ten minutes. You don't see this in practice.
In reality, leaf blowers use very little gasoline. The
Husqvarna 225B, for example, uses 470g of gas per hour-- which is 0.17 gallons, or about a half-liter. If we assume that the "light-duty vehicle" being driven at 30mph gets 22mpg, we find that you'd need to run the leaf-blower non-stop for four months to produce an equivalent carbon consumption (and, hence, emissions.)
So how does Natural Home magazine come up with its pronouncement? I suspected the answer, and confirmed it by reading the
actual California EPA report. What the leaf-blower
actually produces much more of is not net carbon, nor CO2, but unburned hydrocarbons (and, to to a lesser extent, carbon monoxide.) This is true of most small two-stroke engines; about 30% of the gas you put in gets emitted unburned. Four-stroke engines, such as in most cars, spill very little unburned fuel (and, for better or worse, their catalytic converters transform most of the CO into CO2 before exhausting it.)
Now, this unburned gasoline vapor is, of course, probably not great for the environment either. But that's a whole different story. The fact is that a gallon of gas put in a leaf-blower produces the same amount of carbon as a gallon of gas in a car. And, if you want to be technical about it,
less of that gallon of gas gets turned into CO2.
I don't mean to be an apologist for leaf-blowers. I think they're ridiculous. And don't even get me started on the noise. What pisses me off is the careless misrepresentation of facts. And what scares me is that there is probably more than one person who read this magazine and thought to himself, "Wow! By just leaf-blowing a tiny bit less, I can drive my SUV a whole lot more!"-- and is now proceeding to do so.
(P.S. In case you were wondering-- yes, my scooter has a 4-stroke engine.)
Sorry to be so tediously boring. I don't think I'm going to have much else to talk about until this stops.
It's reassuring when charts and graphs confirm what your fallible senses have been telling you. In this case: that we normally get about 5cm of rain during the month of June, but this June we've had close to 20cm. What the graph doesn't show, though, is all the additional days this month where it's been overcast, foggy, and barely spittling rain-- not enough to add appreciably to the accumulation total, but enough to make you look outside and say "FUCK. It's raining AGAIN."
The land is not cheap, of course. But I thought to myself, well, you could buy that nice spot of land, but build just a very small, inexpensive house there. Like maybe a Tumbleweed Tiny House. 
