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RSS icon Comments on Greg Nickels's "Green" Agenda

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Busted.

Posted by ooo | November 2, 2006 1:48 PM
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Before someone says, "Cars are so much worse! Do something about cars first!" If we can't take even the smallest of baby steps toward enacting sensible greenhouse gas policies—like, oh, bringing back rakes—nothing Nickels says about moving mountains to roll back greenhouse gas emissions can be taken seriously.

Posted by Dan Savage | November 2, 2006 1:52 PM
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I like to think of it as performance art. It's on YouTube after all. Maybe someone should talk to the employee (he'd probably enjoy a break). Maybe he has a family to support and had recently gotten laid off by an exciting new enviro-friendly start-up company?

Posted by patron | November 2, 2006 2:02 PM
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Um, Patron, bringing back rakes would create more jobs and probably earn this guy more money, since it's way less efficient to rake leaves than to blow them around.

Posted by Eli Sanders | November 2, 2006 2:05 PM
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Sounds fine to me. Who wants to help begin Rakes-R-Us?

Posted by patron | November 2, 2006 2:07 PM
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They're actually considerable worse for the air than cars in many ways (one study calculates 30 minutes of gas leaf blower use equivelant to the auto outut of driving 7,700 mi [flourocarbons] and 440 mi [carbon monoxide]).

http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/010712/csb5.htm

... coupled with the fact that leaf blowers are completely retarded machines. "Beat it you leaves! Go somewhere else, scram!".

Get a rake and a bag, ferchrissake.

Posted by Dougsf | November 2, 2006 2:08 PM
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...and noise pollution. Don't forget about fucking noise pollution.

Posted by keshmeshi | November 2, 2006 2:09 PM
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Two-stoke engines (blowers, weedeaters, chainsaws) produce 40 times the smog that a new car engine with smog controls produces. So every time you see one of those, think of forty cars idling, or one car for forty hours.

And that doesn't include the dust blown up into the air by leaf-blowers, just the gas-oil mix burning in a well maintained two-stroke engine.

Landscape architects design, in part, on the basis of avilible technology for how their design will be maintained. If you tell them "no blowers, no mowers, no pesticides" they can still make nice public greenspaces. They just have to do it differently.

Think of the impact when you add up all of the landscapes, public and private, in the city.

Posted by Rain Monkey | November 2, 2006 2:17 PM
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another hard-hitting stranger video expose: to catch a grounds keeper. i smell a peabody!

Posted by charles | November 2, 2006 2:18 PM
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Dan,
I stopped taking Nickels seriously for good when he held that incompetent press conference to announce he wasn't going to put the tunnel to a vote because the new info was "too confusing for voters."

It's not so much that I objected to his position on vote or no vote (there's a good debate to be had about that) ... it's that he wasn't being honest with the press corps about his reasons for his flip flop.

The issue was no more or less confusing than it had been two days earlier when he still supported a vote. No. He changed his mind about the vote because the new info upped the tunnel cost to between lowball $3.6B/high end $5.5B. (Nickels original numbers were $3B to $3.6B).

So, that's why he decided not to go the ballot. (Funny, he did the exact opposite with the monorail when the costs went up.)

Anyway, he stood there and kept repeating this nonsense about "confusing info." And, sheesh. If it was so confusing... why was he ready to just go ahead with the tunnel without taking a harder look at it himself?

I haven't been able to take the mayor seriously since that day. Total boob that guy.

Posted by Josh Feit | November 2, 2006 2:19 PM
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Nickels-run Seattle is coated in hypocrisy, film at 11.

As wary as I am of using communist China as an example, they eschew using a motorized street sweeper, instead employing hundreds of people at a modest wage to hand-sweep the streets.

Of course, in the fairer-waged US, that would cost money.

Posted by Gomez | November 2, 2006 2:22 PM
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I've long thought leaf blowers were among man's worst inventions. A lot of noise and a lot of pollution for a machine that is only marginally more efficient than a rake.

I almost never see anyone actually picking up the leaves that these blowers blow around. Someone earnestly blows crud off a sidewalk onto the street. Two minutes later a bus or a truck careens past, wafting most of the crap back up onto the sidewalk.

Thanks, Mayor Green, for this exercise in pointless futility.

Posted by SDA in SEA | November 2, 2006 2:22 PM
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I posted about this problem on my blog months ago, and have been active in trying to get the standards for organic landcare operations (published by the Society for Urban Organic Land Care) to exclude the routine use of gas powered equipment.

Posted by A Natural Gardener | November 2, 2006 2:25 PM
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I agree, gas powered leaf blowers are far far worse than cars.

If they were electric, we'd know more than 90 percent of the energy used was renewable too.

Posted by Will in Seattle | November 2, 2006 2:35 PM
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Actually, this presents a great opportunity to contact the Mayor's office and ask when the city's planning to invest in hybrid leaf blowers :P

Posted by Gomez | November 2, 2006 2:38 PM
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i smell another initiative coming ...

Posted by seattle98104 | November 2, 2006 2:38 PM
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Finally, an ECB post that I agree with.

Posted by Investigatory Journalist | November 2, 2006 2:49 PM
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Ditto.

Posted by Mr. X | November 2, 2006 3:02 PM
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I hate those infernal machines as much as the next person, but...

Using an electric (or hydrogen fuel cell) leaf blower (or car) doesn't eliminate the CO2 and other emissions required to power it. You all know that, right? (Sometimes, when I listen to advocates for these alternatives, I'm not so sure.)

Electric (or hydrogen fuel-cell) devices may not create emissions at the point of use, but the emissions still happen at the power plant. Depending on the clean-ness of the plant and the efficiency of transmission, those emissions could be less or greater than the emissions that would be created by burning fossil fuels at the point of use to generate that power.

Posted by David Wright | November 2, 2006 4:29 PM
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Leaf blowers are not "more efficient" than rakes and brooms. They are dramatically LESS efficient, because they just blow the stuff around. Send it over here, send it over there, go over there and send it back. A guy with a leaf blower is like something out of Beckett.

Rake and broom. Quick, efficient, thorough, and cheap. Leaf blowers are complete bullshit.

Oh, and David Wright: your argument has some merit for highly efficient cars, but none at all for spewing two-stroke leaf blowers. They're HORRIBLE emissions-wise. See the above posts.

Posted by Fnarf | November 2, 2006 5:15 PM
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I've also seen these gas-powered leaf blowers recently in use around the University of Washington campus here in the U District. Nickels and Emmert, in collusion to destroy the environment? Maybe they just haven't gotten the memo yet. "Gas-powered leaf blowers are baad, mmmkay?"

Posted by Old and Cantankerous | November 2, 2006 5:44 PM
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They use these things in the little pocket park on Beacon Hill, a tiny tiny park which is surrounded by houses. Basically it's about the size of a small front yard. They run the leaf blowers at 7am. At least once they started up at the possibly illegal hour of 6:50 am. What I cannot figure out is why it has to be done first thing in the morning like that. Can't they go to a site that is not right next to a bunch of residences first, then come back and do the leaf blowing at our park later in the day? But no. That would make sense, and we can't have any of that.

Though I haven't seen them do the leaf blowing yet this season -- probably because most of the leaves in that park didn't begin to fall until this week. And now they are gonna be all wet. I can only hope that when the guy shows up with the leaf blower again that it will be at a more sensible hour.

(Oh yeah, and exactly why does the garbage pickup for the medical building across the street come at 5am every Tuesday, and then proceed to bang the dumpsters around and wake up the whole neighborhood? Do they get some special exemption from noise laws or something? WTF. If my band bothers a neighbor at 9pm the cops show up, but these jerks can bash around dumpsters and run leaf blowers at the crack of dawn and no one can do anything about it.)

Posted by litlnemo | November 2, 2006 7:28 PM
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The City of Seattle as an organization prefers to pose and preach (telling Eastern Washington to take down its dams to save salmon) rather than actually make the slightest sacrifice to do anything about global warming, species diversity, etc, etc. Meanwhile for some reason much of the citizenry persists in clinging to the delusion that they live better for the planet, and have elected leaders who are doing something progressive in ANY way. So I moved to Mexico City, which people who have never been there think is this environmental nightmare, but actually has (sometimes) intense smog because it is in a mountain valley. 90% of the population in Mexico City DONT HAVE CARS. It is a pedestrian, public-transit oriented city, where people walk, take buses and subway, and there are hordes of cheap cabs. If 28 million Americans lived in one city, it would be the size of Oregon and have a far worse impact on the environment than Mexico City could possibly begin to. And when we run out of oil and the suburbs of the US are impossible to live in, there will be chaos in the US. Meanwhile most of Mexico (and I dont mean just the poor)lives densely and sustainably already, and best of all, they dont have a big stick up their ass. The real power in Seattle is in the hands of corporations and developers. For about 5 minutes it seemed like that was changing. Erica Barnett is the ONLY person talking about the real contradictions between the real Seattle and the ´green´ imaginary one. She is your only hope.

Posted by Grant Cogswell | November 3, 2006 9:54 AM
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90% of Mexico City can barely afford to eat and pay their bills, Cogswell. Bad analogy.

Posted by Gomez | November 3, 2006 9:57 AM
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> Using an electric (or hydrogen fuel cell) leaf blower (or car) doesn't eliminate the CO2 and other emissions required to power it.

Again. We. Live. In. Seattle.

Our power is more than 90 percent renewable hydroelectric - no CO2. More than 1 percent wind energy.

So, using an electric leaf blower is MUCH BETTER than using a 100 percent terrorist-support gas engine leaf blower.

You need basic economics courses. First you walk before you run. If everyone made sure the next car/truck/SUV they bought got 5 mpg better than the last one, we'd cut CO2 emissions and gas consumption dramatically.

Posted by Will in Seattle | November 3, 2006 12:16 PM
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jonny

Posted by jonny | November 14, 2006 10:26 PM

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