Factually! with Adam Conover - Leaf Blowers are Killing Us

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Leaf blowers: a study in how to suck and blow at the same time. Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Okay, picture this. It's a Saturday morning, the birds are chirping. The smoke from the nearby wildfire has finally cleared. And right as you're about to open that book you've been pretending to read, you hear it. The roaring, high-pressure blast of air powered by a rattling two-stroke engine. What's that? Ah, yes, the sweet smell of gasoline.

That's right. A powerful engine is being deployed to move a single leaf from your neighbor's driveway onto your other neighbor's driveway. You know, it's not hyperbole to say that gas-powered leaf blowers are universally hated. Leafblowers need to be eradicated. 100% agree, Lydia Tar.

I'll never forgive the Academy for what they did to you. But, you know, as annoying as you and Galadriel think leafblowers are, they're actually even worse. In fact, using one of these little demons is hands down the worst thing you can do to the environment and your own health. That's why gas-powered leafblowers

have actually been banned in cities across the country, including in L.A. where I live, for 30 years. That's right. The L.A. Leafblower ban is literally old enough to remember 9-11. You know, who else operated way too loud and way too early in the morning? Al-Qaeda. Kida? Al-Qaeda.

So if everybody hates gas-powered leaf blowers, they're terrible for us, and they've been banned in cities across the country, why am I and probably you still hearing them every damn day? I hear it at night, too, sometimes. the sound. I can't get it out of my head. Keeps you up, you know, makes you think about things you'd rather forget. That high-pitched wine slowly penetrating my brain cavity reminded me of the mistakes I've made, the people I've hurt. I mean, sure, nobody's perfect, but I should have left a note. How hard would it have been to leave a note? Well, the answer to the leafblower mystery is not

only a fascinating story, it points to the biggest mistake liberals make when they try and to make the world a better place. And in this video, I'm going to explain what that is and offer a solution, one that will finally give all of us peace. Dude, we are recording! I could come back, like 7 a.m.? No! Okay, so look, I already knew I hated gas-powered leaf blowers, but when I first read about how bad they actually are, I popped my damn monocle. Get this.

Using a gas-powered leaf blower for just one hour, just one hour emits the same level of air pollution as driving a car from LA to Denver. That's 15 hours of driving. That's insane! That's like if I told you every time you used your vacuum cleaner, it caused an oil spill in the Gulf. Or every time you ask chat GPT to look up the capital of Arkansas, it poisoned the water of a town in Arkansas. Okay, that one is actually true. But you know, it might be less hard to believe when you learn that leaf blowers were actually originally designed to be pollution machines. The leafblowers immediate predecessor, its original form, if you will, was actually a backpack crop duster that was meant

for spraying pesticides. Coincidentally, backpack crop duster was my nickname in high school. So these things were literally designed to spray poison into the air. But then, some brilliant businessman realized they could sell a lot more of them if it blasted hot air and gasoline at leaves instead, which is exactly the kind of idea you'd come up with after huffing a bunch of hot air and gasoline. And I mean that literally. because, okay, you might be wondering why such a tiny machine produces so much pollution.

You'd think a smaller motor would pollute less than, say, a car, right? Well, the opposite is actually true, because cars are big enough to come equipped with a lot of stuff that cuts back on dangerous emissions, a catalytic converter, an efficient four-stroke engine, and sometimes, if you're really lucky, a steering wheel. But leaf blowers are too small to fit any of that, so they don't have catalytic converters, and they have to use a primitive two-stroke engine. And these two-stroke engines are incredibly inefficient at processing gasoline, which is strange because when I finish in two-strokes, I'm being super efficient.

In fact, 30% of the gas that passes through a two-stroke engine never even gets used. Instead, it's emitted directly into the air. That means that when you are near a gas-powered leaf blower, you are literally breathing in gasoline. I love the smell of my pump in the morning. Leafblowers and other gas-powered lawn equipment accounted for a quarter of all cancer causing benzene emissions in 2011. And it's not just the air pollution that's dangerous. It's also the noise pollution.

The engine in a leaf blower can reach 110 decibels. Exposure to noise at that level can cause hearing damage and also cognitive decline. And for children, and for neighborhood children, that can mean impaired learning and language development. Hey, maybe that's why all the kids in my neighborhood keep calling me unk.

They've gotten so stupid, they've forgotten gotten how the word ends. And all these negative health effects are felt the most directly, not by people in the neighborhood, but by the person who has to use the dang thing. Using a leaf blower means standing immediately behind a plume of dangerous exhaust and exceeding an unsafe dose of high decibel noise in under an hour. If you saw a friend or even an enemy standing that close to something that gives them cancer and hearing loss, you'd be like, hey, get away from that thing!

And they'd be like, sorry, what? I can't hear you! I have cancer and hearing loss! And by the way, can we just take a moment here to point out that leaves do not need to be blown in the first place? I mean, heaven forbid we get to feel the satisfying crunch of foliage under our feet. There are myriad benefits to leaving leaves on the ground. They help soil stay damp. They reduce the need for watering.

They also release nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients into the soil. So dead leaves are literally a slow feeder for plants. I mean, the entire reason forests have such rich soil is because they spent millions of years letting leaves fall, decompose, and nourish the soil. But when you blow leaves away, you are robbing your lawn of all that healthy food, and then you put fertilizer on top of it

to replace the nutrients you just blast it off with gasoline. But okay, it's a free country. You have a God-given right to blow life-giving leaves off of your lawn and onto your neighbor's windshield if you want to. Fine. But in our free country, we do still put reasonable restrictions on running machines that sicken and kill other people on occasion, right? That's why you can't sell a car without a catalytic converter, or sell an oven that leaks gas

fumes, or sell a gun. Okay, forget that one, that's a special case, but we do make rules against most engines that pollute just a fraction of the amount of poisonous gases leaf blowers do, especially when there's a safer alternative available. And guess what, in this case, there is. It's called an electric leaf blower. What a concept! Using electricity to move air instead of fossil fuels. Amazing. So for all of these reasons, it's quite reasonable that many cities have restricted or banned gas-powered leaf blowers.

Using them has been banned in L.A. since 1996, and their sale has actually been banned in all of California since 2024, the year I turned years old. And yet, despite that, gas-powered leaf blowers are still for sale and in use everywhere in the state. In fact, look what I saw when I went to my local hardware store today to buy a bunch of duct tape, zip ties, and rope for a personal project that's none of your business. What the hell is going on? You know, I went right to the manager and I said, Where is the bathroom? And as I sat in the toilet stall vaping,

I asked myself, why the hell are these things still for sale? Well, the answer is actually a fascinating story, because back in 1996, as soon as that leaf blower ban was introduced in the city of Los Angeles, the gardeners who used the leaf blowers, went on a literal hunger strike to stop it. The Association of Latin American Gardner's of Los Angeles, or a lagal, which is really fun to say, literally set up tents at City Hall and held a vigil for 11 days.

And this was a really significant act of protest. It was an organized and impressive display of actual people power, and it worked. Even though the ban ultimately passed, the lawmakers agreed that it would never be enforced. and the issue became a political red line that lawmakers knew to never cross or even bring up again. And as a result, the ban goes unenforced to this day.

Now, the gardeners back then had a really good reason to protest from their point of view. They argued that if they were forced to go back to the rakes that they had used before, it would hurt their businesses, reduce their incomes, and be hard on their backs. And like, yeah, I'm not fucking raking shit, I get it. But today, electric leaf blowers exist.

They're affordable, they're available, in every hardware store in America, and they're just as powerful as gas-powered leaf blowers. See? Dude, way off! That's an electric leaf blower. Obviously didn't use a gas one for the gag. So, you'd think it would be a little easier to ban gas-powered leafblowers today, right? Well, wrong.

When Evanston, Illinois tried to pass a gas leaf blower ban in 2021, Gardner's there protested once again, just like they did in L.A. 30 years ago. And, you know, protests like these from working class people honestly fighting for what they believe to be in their best interest is hard for liberal lawmakers to ignore. I mean, I know they would like to argue that banning gas lawn equipment would be good for everyone, making for quieter cities and more importantly safer air for both residents and the people using the leaf blowers. And they are right about that. But the problem is, only one group, the gardeners, is being asked to give something up. So there's a psychological phenomenon called loss aversion that says we feel the pain of a potential loss about twice as strongly as we care about the benefit of a potential gain. It's the same reason why when my bank account goes up a little, I shrug, but when it goes down a little, I start looking up how much I can get for selling blood.

Now, of course, the public only stands to benefit from banning gas leaf blowers. But the gardeners, you know, they're the ones who have to buy the new equipment and change how they work. And they're going to feel that loss a lot more quickly and intensely than they're going to feel that loss a lot more quickly and intensely than they're, they feel the benefits of cleaner air, even when they're the ones most affected by the pollution. So it's no surprise that the gardeners react so strongly against bands like these, so strongly that they've been able to consistently block them right up until the present day. See, this is one of the fundamental mistakes that liberals make so often when they try to fix problems.

They take something away. Gas-powered leaf blowers, plastic straws, those little hotel shampoo bottles, without thinking about what happens to people psychologically when something they previews. had is taken from them. Like, you know, I used to take those little shampoo bottles home and put them all in one big bottle. That was my hobby. That was how I wound down at the end of the night. And I can't do that anymore because now the shampoo is bolted to the wall. Oh, it makes me so mad I'm going to burn the holiday into the ground. You can't just ban something and expect people to happily go along with it because you say it's better for them. You're not their mom and, you know, they don't listen to their mom either. You have to think about how to actually make the benefits outweigh the law. for them in their actual lives. But even if liberals don't, you know who does understand the phenomenon

of loss aversion? The right-wing media. And they take advantage of it all the time and use the threat of something being taken away to undermine any attempt to make the world better. Like, take this example, I found out on ground news. It shows you exactly why media framing matters so much. New York is suing the sports betting platform call sheet

because they are allegedly letting underage kids gamble. Now, many sources report that straightforwardly, but this one says that Letitia James wants to ban predictions in New York. Oh, not my precious predictions! Or check out this story from the UK, where a new rule would restrict the sale of gas-powered space heaters and towel warmers. But some sources frame it as Ed Miliband coming for your towel warmers, which is a framing straight out of the fossil fuel industry playbook.

But if you use Ground News, you can see that these sources are right-leaning and have low factuality ratings. Ground News gives you a bias and factuality rating for every source so you can see how media bias affects the headlines you read. They even show you who owns every news source so you can see if they have any financial incentive to tell the story a certain way. So if you want to be a more informed consumer, well guess what? You can use my special code factually to get 40% off a subscription to Ground News. That's right, use my code factually at groundnews.com to get 40% off.

And if you want to support this channel directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month that gets you every episode we do ad free. We'd love to have you. So what do we do? I mean, we know the facts. Gas-powered leaf blowers are incredibly bad for us, incredibly bad for the planet. We have to get rid of them quickly and safely. But if we just ban them, it'll trigger loss aversion and undermine the very ban we're trying to put in place. Well, guess what? There is actually a way to fight climate change, make our cities quieter and make the weekends more sane for all of us.

All we have to do is actually respect the people we're asking to make a change and think about how to make it worth their while to do so, to give them a real incentive that matters to them. In other words, we just have to use more carrot than stick, especially since the stick is just going to get blown into someone's yard by a leaf blower and then blown back the other way. So here's what I propose to stop the endless cycle of blowback. What if we just went up to every gardener in Los Angeles,

or, hey, even in the country, and offer them $100 and a free electric leaf blower if they do the right thing and upgrade? Well, we have proof that this works. In 2022, California spent about $30 million on vouchers, to incentivize landscapers to trade in their gas blowers for electric ones. And demand was so high that the program's funding ran out less than a year later. The challenge wasn't convincing people to switch.

It was keeping up with demand. The only problem was the money ran out. So we know the carrot works, we're just not buying enough goddamn carrots. And hey, vouchers are nice, but what good are they if people don't know they exist or don't know about the dangers of gas-powered leaf blowers in the first place? Because not only are these plans not well-funded enough, states hardly advertise them at all. So, what are we to do? Just sit around, being deafened and sickened by exhaust fumes every summer afternoon until lawmakers step up and start understanding human psychology and communication?

Well, good luck with that. No, this is an issue that we can make a big difference in in our own lives. And it's by doing something that I know is kind of scary to contemplate in America in 2026, but it's this, talking to your neighbors. Ugh, what could be worse, but bear with me. During the wildfires in Los Angeles, I started talking to my neighbors about leaf blowers because, you know, they were blowing toxic ash back up into the air in addition to all the other health effects. And it turned out that it was really easy to start a conversation

about an issue that affected all of us in our own neighborhood. And once I did, it turned out that my neighbors had no idea how bad gas powered leaf blowers were and they were really eager to make a change. One of my neighbors literally ended up giving his gardener an extra hundred bucks to make the switch and since then he's only used an electric blower. And maybe you're thinking, hey, that's easy in LA, that neighbor was probably a woke Gen Z drinking a cortado in a beanie. But no, he was a baby boomer Republican. He just also cared about his peace of mind and the air he breathes. It turns out that when you talk to people and meet them where they're at and actually

help them make their lives better, every once in a while they will be moved to make a change. It turns out it's not that hard to make our communities better and healthier and safer. We just need to help each other make the better choice, the actually easier choice. Oh my God, I will give you a hundred bucks to go away. Hell yeah. Where's that money? That was a hate gum podcast.