The communist majority legislature in California passed a ban on gas-powered lawnmowers and other landscaping tools that just went into effect on January 1st. It’s all part of the lunatic Green New Deal plan to save the weather from being 1 degree warmer sometime in the hazy, distant future. As with all “solutions” from the Democrat Party, the new law is already causing landscaping companies to fire workers and spend huge sums out-of-pocket to convert their equipment to newer, far more expensive, and less efficient electrical tools.
Jazz Montgomery was living the dream in Costa Mesa, CA. He started his own landscaping company in 2020 and was quickly able to build a four-person crew. They were providing lawn mowing, pruning, and yard care to customers, and the business was growing.
“But ever since that stupid rule change,” Jazz says.
That stupid rule was California Assembly Bill 1346. The new law banned the sale of gas-powered leaf blowers, lawnmowers, and other small engines across the state—with no exceptions and no grandfather clause. The law has completely crushed smaller businesses like Jazz Montgomery’s.
“I actually scaled down my crew,” he says. “It used to be four of us. And then I scaled it down to two because I had to try to make up the cost to be able to get the equipment.”
The California Air Resource Board estimates that it will suck $1.29 billion out of landscaping businesses to make the transition to all-electric tools and mowers. Not to worry, though! The Commiefornia legislature set aside $30 million to help landscaping companies offset the costs. Which works out to $15 per piece of equipment if every company takes advantage of it.
“What if one of us doesn’t get qualified for one of those programs?” asks Montgomery. “That’s over $30,000, $40,000 [for an electric riding mower]. That’s coming out of our pockets. And there’s no work around.”
Even the cheapest electric riding mower, which isn’t intended for commercial purposes, costs around $5,000 on Amazon. There’s also the fact that electric mowers and other tools are much less efficient than their gas-powered counterparts. If your gas-powered mower runs out of gas during the workday, it takes five minutes to refill the tank and go back to work. If your electric mower runs out of juice, you have to shut down operations for a few hours so it can use electricity from a coal-fired plant to recharge the battery.
That translates into fewer lawns mowed per workday and much less money over the course of a month. Landscaping companies that are able to stay in business in California’s regulatory climate are now having to raise their prices because of all this, which effectively prices the middle class out of being able to afford to have their lawns professionally cared for. Yeah, we know, First World problems.
Still, all of this regulatory burden and cost is being imposed on blue-collar workers in order to fix a problem that is not real. Global warming is fake. It’s not happening. Forcing everyone to use electric lawnmowers is not going to make the tiniest dent in the earth’s climate. Anyone who believes that this will make a difference or that it will somehow impact the weather needs to wear a helmet whenever they go outside.
The new lawn mower ban in California is the perfect encapsulation of every policy proposed by the Democrat Party. It costs hardworking people their jobs, it costs a ton of money, and it tries to fix a problem that doesn’t even exist.
