Ten years ago, when Michael Hall retired as dean of students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and began to spend more time at home, he noticed an ear-splitting noise — something he’d never been around during the day to hear. “The neighbor’s contractor was rattling my windows and assaulting my ears!” he says. One day, he went out and met the contractor at the curb and said, “Can you dial back on the leaf blower? There’s only 10 feet between our houses and it’s really a nuisance.” The contractor responded, “If you kept better care of that side of your house, I wouldn’t have to do that.”  

That launched Hall on a mission that he’s still leading to this day. “At first I started out as Don Quixote out there, tilting at windmills,” says Hall, who describes himself as an old Berkeley hippie. Today he’s not only a co-chair of Quiet Clean PDX, a grassroots organization that’s pushing to ban the use of gas-powered leaf blowers city-wide, but part of a growing national movement. More than 100 US cities have banned gas-powered leaf blowers and over 45 different organizations across the country are part of the Quiet Clean Alliance, from Quiet Clean Philly to Quiet Clean Seattle.  

Michael Hall. Courtesy of Quiet Clean PDX

Not only do gas-powered leaf blowers create extreme noise pollution — the most powerful can produce sounds of up to 100 decibels of low-frequency noise, around the same as a Boeing 737 taking off — they are also an environmental menace and a threat to human health. Most have what’s called a “two-stroke engine,” an outmoded design that burns a mix of gas and oil (for lubrication). It’s been shown that because this type of equipment doesn’t have catalytic converters, only two-thirds of the gas and oil mix is burned as fuel. The rest is emitted as toxic fumes of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), two of the main ingredients in ground-level ozone, which both trigger asthma attacks and contribute to premature death. In fact, according to the California Air Resources Board, a single operator using a gas leaf blower for one hour generates the same smog-forming emissions as one car driving 1,100 miles. These small devices also leak formaldehyde and benzene, both of which are known carcinogens. And the people who are most impacted by these toxic fumes? The lawn care workers who use them, many of whom are from lower socio-economic backgrounds. After that, children, the elderly and anyone who is ill are the most impacted — and unlike landscapers, they aren’t wearing protective gear. 

Finally, these relatively small devices also emit tons (literally) of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming. According to the latest data from the EPA, fossil fuel-powered lawn equipment (including not just leaf blowers but trimmers, mowers, weedwackers, etc.) emits 30 million tons of carbon dioxide in the US each year — more than the amount of greenhouse gases that Los Angeles produced in 2021. 

The high-decibel noise pollution of a gas-powered leaf blower is not just obnoxious and disruptive; it can actually cause tinnitus and hearing loss for the workers who use them (or anyone who is close to one for a full hour). In an article in The Atlantic about his antipathy to gas-powered leaf blowers, journalist (and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter) James Fallows explained why the low-frequency buzz of these devices is especially insidious. “Low-frequency noise has a great penetrating power: It goes through walls, cement barriers, and many kinds of hearing-protection devices,” writes Fallows. The upshot is that even if crews are wearing ear protection, they’ll likely suffer hearing loss after long-term repeated use. 

A single operator using a gas-powered leaf blower for one hour generates the same smog-forming emissions as one car driving 1,100 miles. Credit: Bob Pool / Shutterstock

When it comes to changing the status quo, California is in the lead, as usual, being the first state to require manufacturers to make zero-emission lawn equipment including leaf blowers, lawn mowers and other small off-road lawn equipment. (The law went into effect this month). Though the law doesn’t ban existing gas-powered leaf blowers or lawn mowers, the California legislature has also allocated $30 million in incentives for individuals and landscaping businesses to make the switch to zero-emission lawn equipment. 

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Cities from Burlington, Vermont to Evantston, Illinois have banned the sale and use of gas-powered leaf blowers along with one county: Montgomery County, Maryland. At least 25 cities across California have enacted legislation to regulate or ban gas-powered leaf blowers including Oakland, Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara.  

But the gold standard, according to Hall from Quiet Clean PDX, is Quiet Clean D.C. James Fallows and Chuck Elkins, former director of the Noise Control Program at the EPA, led the charge years ago and after a three-year phase-in, the ban finally went into effect in 2022. By all accounts, it has been successful. What sets Washington, D.C.’s ban apart is its broad prohibition of gas-powered blowers (it is both illegal to use them and illegal to sell them in District stores); a three-year ramp-up that allowed for education and compliance; and no-nonsense enforcement. According to Hall, “They’ve got it set up where a citizen affidavit can be filed to the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection and then the Department sends, at first, a warning. They didn’t want it to be punitive, they wanted it to be an educational issue for the mow and blow guys,” he says. After that first warning, fines of up to $500 are issued. 

Electric leaf blowers are expensive — but once you have one, you never have to buy oil or gas again. Credit: JacZia / Shutterstock

There are many arguments against the bans. Some landscapers argue that the electric blowers aren’t as powerful. Others complain about the expense of buying all new equipment. Hall from Quiet Clean PDX understands that people have a deep relationship with their tools and may be reluctant to part with them. But he points out that there’s also an economic benefit to converting. It costs about $2,000 to get a top-of-the-line electric leaf blower (including charger and batteries), but the return on investment is only a year or two at most. After that, you never have to buy gasoline or oil again. 

The Santa Cruz Coalition for a Healthy & Safe Environment recently published a study on the economics of switching and found that even in the most expensive scenario, for a high-performance Stihl battery blower, the savings are significant. Though the up-front cost of this device is $2,261 (including tax), the coalition found, a positive return on investment is seen in just 10.5 months. By the end of the second year, using the electric blower would already have saved $2,904.  

Nick Seagraves, who runs Seagraves Landscaping in West Linn, Oregon, has been a landscaper for 40 years. He only started using electric devices a few years ago, mostly because Lake Oswego’s Department of Parks & Recreation (a client) required it. He has a crew of 14 and says that his guys like the electric blowers. “They actually prefer them,” he admits. That said, he says that even the Husqvarna electric models he purchased don’t put out quite as much energy as the gas blowers. But now that he has them, he says homeowner associations that have long been clients really appreciate them. “It gives us an edge,” he says. 

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Many cities (including D.C. and Dallas) are offering rebates or trade-in programs for quieter and less polluting electric blowers, which helps lessen the initial cost of switching over. On January 1 of this year, a new law went into effect in Colorado giving residents a 30 percent discount on all electric lawn mowers, leaf blowers, trimmers, and snow blowers.

Back in Portland, Quiet Clean PDX is working to get Portland City Council to vote on the issue this year. Does Hall hope that Quiet Clean PDX will eventually take up the crusade against electric leaf blowers, too? Even though they don’t emit benzene or VOCs, they still generate propulsive wind speeds of up to 200 miles per hour, stirring up ultrafine particles of demolition debris, fecal matter, pollens, pesticides, dirt and debris, and industrial pollutants. 

Courtesy of the Xerces Society

Hall is philosophical. “Yes, it would be great to Make America Rake Again,” he says. He is a proponent of Leave the Leaves, a campaign initiated by the Xerces Society, a nonprofit committed to protecting pollinators and other invertebrates. Pollinators, it turns out, find their homes in leaves that are a few inches thick. “We’ve had a tremendous uptick in birds since we started leaving the leaves,” Hall says. 

But Hall’s main focus is eliminating gas-powered blowers. Though he started out most offended by the devices’ noise pollution, he’s now more panicked about the carbon dioxide they emit. “It’s an existential issue right now,” Hall says. 

“I’ve become oddly more incremental in my thinking,” he says. He points to a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.” 

“If my contribution can be getting off the polluting, death-creating bottom line with lawn equipment,” Hall says, “that’s what I’d like to do with the remainder of my life.”  

The post The Movement to ‘Make America Rake Again’ appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

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The Government's plans to tackle the growing problems of flooding – particularly in rural areas – are “a drop in the ocean”, according to a new parliamentary report.

The House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee is highly critical of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency for failing to protect people from flooding – or even knowing how much money is required to solve the problem.

It follows a damning report by the National Audit Office last year which found that nearly six million homes are at risk from flooding and that only 200,000 more could be protected by 2027, instead of a planned 336,000. As Chancellor, Rishi Sunak reduced the budget for flood protection.

Now, after questioning officials from both bodies, MPs are demanding faster action to tackle the problem – particularly as the agency underspent its budget by £310 million in the first two years of a six-year programme.

Deteriorating flood defences are putting 203,000 more properties at risk of flooding – 3,000 more than the extra 200,000 homes due to be protected by 2027 under a £5.2 billion programme.

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Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the committee's deputy chair, said: “With the reality of climate change and increasing rainfall, robust flood resilience must of course become an ever-increasing priority. As we have recently seen once again, the depredations caused by such disasters are a matter of life and death for communities up and down the country.

"This inquiry has uncovered the alarming truth that, in a number of ways, the approach to keeping our citizens safe in this area is contradictory and self-defeating, not least in the continuing development of new housing in areas of high flood risk without appropriate mitigations.

“The number of properties at risk of flooding from deteriorating defences eclipsing those benefitting from new ones is another case in point. This is emblematic both of the Government’s failure to strike the right balance between maintenance and construction, and of not considering the net number of properties at risk.”

The NAO already highlighted storms Babet and Ciaran which struck in October and November 2023. The Met Office reported that 18 to 20 October 2023 was the third-wettest independent three-day period for England and Wales in a series dating back to 1891. The Environment Agency reported that, by the end of October, Storm Babet alone had caused 2,200 homes to be flooded.

Storm Henk caused widespread flooding at the beginning of this year.

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The only change the Environment Agency made was to transfer £25 million of the unused money to improve maintenance and allocated £100 million to help alleviate flooding in isolated homes in rural areas. The committee called this “a drop in the ocean” to tackle the problem.

It also criticised the bureaucracy required to set up small scale flood protection schemes and the need to attract partners – whether private or local authorities – to finance the work. The result is that flood prevention schemes are skewed to where the agency can get partners rather than to where there is a need to combat flooding, the MPs found.

The committee is demanding that the agency publishes a list of overdue work held up by lack of partners by April.

The MPs are also critical that new estates are still being built on flood plains which will only add to the problem. The agency claims that 99% are not – but admits the 1% includes large estates.

Measures to protect homes, ordered by the Environment Agency, are not often inspected to see if they are carried out as many local authorities do not have the resources or expertise to do so.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Since 2010, we have invested over £6 billion to better protect over 600,000 properties from flooding and coastal erosion. Thanks to this significant investment, 381,000 homes have been protected since 2015, with over 102,000 protected during Storm Henk.

“We’re now going further to improve capacity to deliver flood defences, with a record £5.2 billion being invested between 2021-27, creating thousands of new flood and coastal risk management schemes to better protect hundreds of thousands of properties across England.

“We will consider the PAC’s recommendations as we continue to work closely with the Environment Agency to protect hundreds of thousands of homes from floods.”  

The world’s largest public relations firm has used insights from its lauded annual global survey of consumer trust and corporate credibility to help fossil fuel and petrostate clients to promote climate obstruction.

According to a new briefing from the Clean Creatives, an advocacy group focused on cutting the public relations industry’s ties with fossil fuels, the PR juggernaut Edelman has employed its purportedly definitive “trust barometer” — the newest edition of which will be released Monday at the World Economic Forum — to help fossil fuel companies more effectively manufacture public trust. With Edelman’s help, these corporations turned oil and gas workers into a positive public face for fossil fuels, obscuring the role of the profit-hungry executives who actually pull the strings.

The trust barometer has “always been positioned as this quasi-academic contribution of Edelman: ‘We’re just looking at how things are shaped in the world,’ as if they’re doing it in some magnanimous gesture or service to the world,” Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, told The Lever. “This report shows that the trust barometer is built to generate business.”

Clean Creatives’s findings, which are being published for the first time by The Lever, include the revelation that “Energy Citizens,” an ultimately successful astroturf campaign launched by the American Petroleum Institute while Edelman was the organization’s single largest contractor, hewed closely to Edelman’s proprietary insights about trust. The effectiveness of Energy Citizens, which involved making oil and gas workers the “human face” of the fossil fuel industry to create the impression of widespread grassroots support, contributed to the defeat of U.S. climate legislation in 2010.

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In 2014, well after Edelman had begun to use the annual trust barometer to construct its own reputation as an objective and authoritative source on trust in society, the firm leveraged its survey findings for TransCanada, a Canadian oil and gas giant that needed help persuading the public to support the construction of Energy East, its controversial tar sands pipeline from Alberta to the Atlantic coast.

In “Grassroots Advocacy” documents leaked by Greenpeace, Edelman suggested a “recruitment goal” of 35,000 “advocates” for the pipeline — including 1,200 TransCanada employees, or around a quarter of the company’s workforce — who would be “tagged and tracked” in part by “how they perform over time” in pushing for the pipeline.

“Edelman’s recommended approach to public relations is built upon the provision of insights from research; our work with Energy East will be no different,” Edelman advised TransCanada at the time. These insights stemmed in part from “research data from our annual trust barometer.”

According to Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, such examples illustrate how Edelman has used its insights — under the guise of studying public trust — to help the fossil fuel industry fight climate action. 

“When Edelman finds that engagement from employees and ‘people like me’ is an important part of developing trust in corporations, you immediately see those tactics being deployed on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute and companies like TransCanada,” said Meisel. “It’s clear that the trust barometer isn’t just a reflection of Edelman’s perspective on trust, but it’s actually a piece of how they advance the goals and strategies of fossil fuel polluters.”

When asked for comment, an Edelman spokesperson sent The Lever the following statement: “We use the insights from the trust barometer research to inform our teams and help organizations earn and protect trust. We also make the findings available publicly and share the data with academic and other third-party researchers to help inform their work.”

“Soft Power… Is Part Of Climate Obstruction”

Edelman will release a new edition of its trust barometer on Monday at the World Economic Forum, the exclusive gathering of corporate and political elites, in Davos, Switzerland. 

“We have the privilege of being in the room where it happens,” Richard Edelman, the firm’s CEO, wrote in a blog post last month. “There is power in what we do, to set a new context, to motivate through ideas that enable action.”

Edelman is the largest independent PR firm in the world, with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The firm has a two-decade-long track record of working for the fossil fuel industry, serving corporate clients — including Shell, ExxonMobil, and the lobbying group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers — as well as oil-rich petrostates, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Edelman began working for the Saudi government in 2013, but expanded its relationship with the kingdom following Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power. The trust barometer “provide[s] valuable data and insights both for Edelman’s own operations and those of its clients to inform communications approaches in each sector,” declared The Arab Weekly in 2022, celebrating Edelman’s finding that Saudi citizens professed high levels of trust in the authoritarian regime.

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More recently, Edelman earned headlines for its lucrative work for the Emirati government and specifically for Sultan al Jaber, the head of Abu Dhabi’s state-run oil company and chair of last year’s UN climate summit in Dubai.

At the Dubai summit, “the Saudi government was the leading force in opposing language around eliminating fossil fuels in the draft text,” Clean Creatives’s Meisel said. “This is their goal. And so the soft power that [Edelman is] helping these countries develop through something like the trust barometer is part of climate obstruction.”

“Corporations Need To Change To Win”

The trust barometer emerged in 2000 from Edelman’s effort to understand why Americans were losing faith in corporations. The first measure involved a telephone survey of around 1,300 “opinion shapers” in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Today, the trust barometer incorporates online responses from 32,000 people across 28 countries, sometimes separating respondents into a “mass population” and a higher-income, college-educated “informed public.”

In a 2021 retrospective, Richard Edelman described the creation of the survey “as a direct response to the ‘Battle of Seattle’” — protests and marches against globalization surrounding a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization.

In a slide deck that accompanied the first trust barometer, released in January 2001, Edelman said that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were “winning” in part because they “skip elite media and go straight to the consumer through web, popular press, [and] TV.”

“NGOs have taken their case straight to the consumer,” Steve Lombardo, then head of Edelman’s StrategyOne arm that produced the early trust surveys, said. “Corporations need to change to win. They need to adopt strategies and tactics that are similar to NGOs.” (In 2014, less than a year after leaving Edelman, Lombardo became the chief communications and marketing officer at Koch Industries.)

By 2006, the trust barometer reported that a company’s “most credible spokesperson” was no longer a “third-party expert,” but rather a “person like yourself.” Edelman also observed “skyrocket[ing]” trust in “regular employees” and “friends [and] family.” 

That year’s barometer included what Edelman called a “New Approach to Communications,” which suggested that firms would be better off prioritizing “peer-to-peer engagement” over “top-down” communications. According to Edelman’s presentation, “employees” and “core consumers” would be among an organization’s “best advocates.”

Edelman does not publish the full data or the methodology behind the survey. But the firm continued to use its proprietary data to refine its advice for corporations, encouraging them to move away from obvious, top-down PR efforts, and toward what today we commonly call “influencers.”

“A ‘person like me’ is not based on standard demographics like gender, race, or religion, but rather on shared interests, professions, and political beliefs,” Edelman declared in a report accompanying the 2007 trust barometer. “The key… is to identify groups of people who think alike and facilitate the exchange of substantive information among them.”

“Citizens Like You, Raising Their Voices”

As Edelman was discovering the persuasive power of a “person like me,” it was also building relationships with an industry hungry for its advice.

“The U.S. oil sector has rarely enjoyed public popularity,” Tim Wood, a professor in the department of communication and media studies at Fordham University, told The Lever. “They routinely fall near the bottom of surveys ranking the industries Americans trust. So while companies in other sectors might be able to take those trust barometer findings with a grain of salt, oil industry players were more primed to listen.”

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One such industry player would become one of Edelman’s biggest clients: the American Petroleum Institute (API), the country’s largest lobbying group for oil and gas companies.

API launched a front group, Energy Citizens, in 2009 in an effort “to put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy,” as API president Jack Gerard phrased it in a leaked email that August. Gerard called for API members, who included some of the largest fossil fuel producers in the world, to “provide significant attendance” of their employees — who the public would see simply as “Energy Citizens” — at rallies against the American Clean Energy and Security Act that had passed the House of Representatives earlier that year and would have created a cap-and-trade system to incentivize U.S. companies to reduce emissions.

“The measure of success for these events will be the diversity of the participants expressing the same message,” Gerard wrote. In addition to employees, “please include all vendors, suppliers, contractors, retirees, and others who have an interest in our success.” The climate bill died in the Senate the following year.

“I actually don’t believe that API is a bad actor in this, I really don’t,” Richard Edelman told journalist Brian Merchant in 2014. But the record speaks for itself, Merchant wrote in Vice: “Edelman… worked to help kill what many agreed was the single best chance the nation has ever had to pass climate legislation.”

“This information [was] not only collected but then deliberately used against the public to shape public opinion — and also without them knowing,” said Caroline Sassan, a researcher at Brown University, who has studied Energy Citizens and other fossil fuel campaigns. “That this information is being wielded by large power structures to actually work against the interest of the public… makes it especially damaging.”

API first hired Edelman in 2006. While it’s unclear exactly what Edelman did for the group the following year, IRS records make clear that by 2008 Edelman had become API’s single biggest contractor. Edelman earned more than $75 million from its work for API in 2008 and more than $68 million in 2009, the year that API launched Energy Citizens. (Altogether Edelman and its subsidiaries would bring in nearly $440 million from about a decade of work for API.)

In 2011, The Washington Post reported that Edelman helped API cast “REAL PEOPLE not Actors” in an Energy Citizens TV commercial highlighting “American Made Energy.”

The following year, API kicked off “Vote 4 Energy,” the next chapter of Energy Citizens, which featured “supposedly average people looking into the camera and saying ‘I vote… for American domestic energy’ and promoting the industry’s goals of opening up more land to drilling,” as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a watchdog group, described it.

Blue Advertising, an Edelman subsidiary, created Vote 4 Energy’s “I’m an Energy Voter” campaign, describing it in a case study as an effort “unprecedented in the industry’s history.” 

Edelman spun off Blue in 2015, officially ending the company’s work for API (Blue did additional work for the lobbying group). But the ramifications of Edelman’s efforts continue.

“What Energy Citizens did… was routinize citizen organizing within the oil industry,” Fordham’s Tim Wood said. “All of a sudden individual oil companies, smaller trade groups, and state-level coalitions were copying pages from the Energy Citizens playbook, often with financial or staffing support from the API.”

Energy Citizens “has set major tactical trends that the industry still follows,” Wood said. And nearly two decades after Edelman informed its clients that people were more trusting of a “person like yourself,” Energy Citizens appears still to be making use of the firm’s advice. The group’s current slogan: “Citizens Like You, Raising Their Voices.”

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“A Way To Greenwash — Or Trustwash — Their Own Reputation”

One of Edelman’s other undertakings for API was to help gin up public support for an extension of Keystone XL, a massive crude oil pipeline that would have allowed the Canadian tar sands producer TransCanada to move oil from Alberta to the Texas coast and, from there, ship it to refineries around the world.

The project ultimately failed, but TransCanada nevertheless hired Edelman in 2014 to craft a campaign for Keystone XL’s backup plan: Energy East, a nearly 2,900-mile proposed pipeline.

Clean Creatives found that Edelman was explicit about leveraging its trust barometer research to win over a skeptical Canadian public. “Based on Edelman’s 2014 trust data, Canadians trust employees and subject matter experts more than CEOs or board members,” Edelman told its client in a memo leaked by Greenpeace. “Our experience has shown that using subject matter experts, employees, or third-party advocates is often much more effective in establishing a connection with the public.”

Edelman noted that “messaging should leverage TransCanada’s brand wherever possible” because “Edelman’s 2014 trust data” found that Canadians were more trusting of “companies with Canadian headquarters.”

Edelman also proposed “using advocates, employees, and subject-matter experts to speak about the benefits of the project” because the trust barometer revealed that “Canadians trust employees and subject matter experts more than CEOs.”

Alison Taylor, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said that the Clean Creatives briefing is a reminder that for Edelman, the trust barometer is fundamentally about marketing. “The problem… is the widespread portrayal that this is some independent, think tank-type exercise,” she said.

TransCanada dropped Edelman shortly after the Greenpeace memos were published. Since then, Edelman’s clients have included oil and gas giants ExxonMobil and Shell, as well as anti-climate trade groups like the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the National Association of Manufacturers, and National Mining Association.

“It’s quite clear that Edelman is, with their work, directly undermining the kinds of trust-building measures that we need to build consensus around this issue,” said Meisel at Clean Creatives. “Edelman uses the trust barometer as a way to greenwash — or trustwash — their own reputation around this issue. And it’s a way to have them position themselves as supporters of the principles of climate action, while also doing quite the opposite with their actual work.”

For the time being I will continue my Wednesday format where I cover some things that crossed my mind in the last week but which I don’t provide detailed analysis. The items can be totally orthogonal. The latest inflation data for Australia continues to affirm the transitory narrative – dropping significantly over the last month.…