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As a cub reporter in the late 1980s, I was assigned to cover the City Council of Palo Alto, California. The two big issues facing the City Council then were unsightly cable television boxes being installed on people’s yards — cable was a new thing at the time — and obnoxious leaf blowers.

I chafed at this assignment. I wanted to cover something big — the wars in Central America, the crack cocaine epidemic or, like every young reporter with a heart, homelessness. And here I was being forced to take seriously the very First World problems of the privileged burghers of Silicon Valley. In a place cynics liked to call “Shallow Alto.”

“These kinds of devices might be OK in Sunnyvale,” a white-maned grandee might say in testifying for a ban on leaf blowers, referring to a less privileged nearby community. “But I think we all know that here in Palo Alto, we do things a little differently.”

Forty years later, to my horror, I have become one of them.

Not in terms of being a pompous patrician or dissing Sunnyvale, but in a deep-seated loathing of leaf blowers.

I live in Kaimuki, and work at home a fair amount, and pretty much any time of day you can hear the insectile drone of gas-powered leaf blowers.

Once every two weeks, a white van parks in the lot I share with other bungalows. The landscapers from hell have arrived. My blood pressure shoots up as I rush to shut all my jalousie windows even though I know that they will do little to block the noise and stink. I turn on the two window air conditioning units in the vain hope that they will purify the air.

During a brief time when my adult son lived with me, he would take one look out the window at the white van and literally bolt out the door to the beach for an hour or two. Hmmm, now that I think of it, I wonder if the leaf blowers drove him out of Hawaii.

I don’t follow his sage example. Instead, I stubbornly hunker down in the house, peering through the jalousie slats at the landscaping crew. It’s hard to describe the emotion I feel — watching an activity you abhor with an almost loving attention to detail. Is there a word for that? There should be.

I watch as a landscaper chases one leaf across the yard with his infernal machine. Wouldn’t it be easier just to lean over and pick it up? They come right next to my house, filling it with fumes and dust and a noise like a jet engine. I relax a little when it seems they have finished my place. But then for mysterious reasons 10 minutes later they come back and do it all again.

I see how they keep the leaf blower revving even as they walk across the leafless parking lot. That makes me wonder if all the noise and commotion isn’t a byproduct of the leaf-blowing but the purpose — letting the client know what a thorough, gas-fueled job you’re doing. Not a bug but a feature.

Even when I hike in the Koolaus I can’t escape them. The Waahila Ridge Trail is one of my favorites — koa trees big enough to make a canoe out of, panoramic views of the Waikiki skyline, Diamond Head and the ocean beyond. But no matter when I go, the sound of gas-powered leaf blowers wafts up from Manoa Valley. Nothing says your wilderness experience is phony like the groan of leaf blowers.

I am not writing this column to blow off steam — though I must admit it feels good. I am writing it as a way to address the question of why we often seem incapable of action for the collective good, even when it involves the smallest of steps.

It turns out that several bills have been introduced to ban gas-powered leaf blowers in Honolulu and other urban parts of the state. And there are many Hawaii residents who feel just like I do.

“After blowing the leaves and anything else around, the operators then try to corral the items using a broom. Whatever happened to the old fashioned way, rakes?” one wrote in support of a leaf blower ban in the last legislative session.

“Those of us with respiratory and chemical disabilities have been waiting for years for these horrible devices to be banned,” another wrote.

A third: “Our house stinks of gasoline every morning from these horrible machines.”

Yet another, like me, watches closely with a kind of perverse rapture as “yard crew members use them to chase a single leaf several yards across the grass, blow leaves off the sidewalk onto the street, then blow them into a pile, many of which come back on the sidewalk and have to be chased again.”

Proponents of these bills, which all failed, stressed the noise and pollutants that gas-powered leaf blowers create. They also cite this from the California Air Resources Board: Running a gas-powered leaf blower for one hour is the smog-forming equivalent of driving 1,100 miles in a newer-model, light duty passenger car. So if the crew that comes to my house every two weeks uses five blowers for an hour, that adds up to driving across the mainland United States and most of the way back again.

But, as is almost always the case in matters of public policy, there is another side to this debate.

A gas-powered leaf blower ban “would have detrimental impacts to the maintenance activities and services we provide for Oahu’s communities,” the Honolulu parks department said. Battery-powered blowers, it said, would be “insufficient.”

Schools didn’t like the idea, either. It would cost $580,000 for all 258 schools to buy four battery-powered leaf blowers each, the Department of Education said. And they don’t even do the job right.

Then, of course, we had a lengthy letter in opposition to a ban from the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, representing the industry that provides tools for the nation’s 8 million landscaping and construction professionals.

Institute? What, they have Albert Einstein working on quantum weed whackers there?

First, the institute bad-mouthed battery-powered leaf blowers. It only takes 18 minutes in “turbo mode” for the battery to drain, compared to an hour (or I would snidely add 1,100 car miles of pollution) for the gas-powered kind.

A typical small landscaper would have to pay $10,000 for the privilege of replacing their gas versions with these wimps, the institute said, and the batteries would have to be replaced every three years.

“‘Facts’ comparing outdoor power equipment emissions to automobiles are not rooted in sound data or are misleading or outright false.” Those weasels at the California Air Resources Board!

I don’t want to make light of the real effects a ban might have, particularly on small businesses and sole proprietors just trying to stay afloat in a place where it isn’t easy.

Running a gas-powered leaf blower for one hour is the smog-forming equivalent of driving 1,100 miles in a newer-model, light duty passenger car.

And yet, somehow, other places have found ways to deal with this.

More than 100 jurisdictions have banned leaf blowers and many more have put limits on when they can be used, according to . California is banning the sale of new gas-powered leaf blowers starting in 2024, although it will allow people to keep using the ones they have.

California and Washington, D.C., which has one of the strictest bans on gas-powered leaf blower use, set up funds to help small landscaping businesses buy electric equipment, .

One owner of a landscaping business . “The electric ones are just as powerful as gas blowers, you charge them overnight and just go for it. My crew doesn’t get sick like they used to, they don’t get respiratory issues like they used to, they love it.

“These blowers don’t make the big stupid noise of the gas ones, it’s more like a vacuum cleaner noise. I think they are great.”

Some of the people who wrote in opposition to the Hawaii bills made some very valid points.

First, who would enforce this ban? Police have better things to do than writing tickets for illegally operating a gas-powered leaf blower. I know from my own reporting that, even when the Honolulu Police Department writes tickets for setting off illegal fireworks, the citations are almost always dismissed.

It’s never a good idea to pass a law without a plan to enforce it.

Second, why not spend money instead on an ad campaign to persuade people to make changes?

That gets to the heart of my struggle with this issue. Do we need laws, or a change in societal attitudes, to make progress on problems, including those that are far bigger than leaf blowers?

Can’t people just be convinced to jettison these gas-guzzling monsters? Especially in a state where, in my experience, people abhor selfish behavior in public? Where billboards were banned so we could all enjoy the sublime vistas?

Societal norms do evolve. Around the same time I was churning out stories on Palo Alto’s leaf blower ban, I would go to a bar or a concert knowing I would smell like cigarette smoke for days.

Was it laws or attitudes that created a world largely free of second-hand smoke? Or some combination of the two?

While I’m skeptical that a legal ban is the answer, I’m even more pessimistic that this problem can be solved by persuasion. Now leaf blowers have been swept into the nation’s intractable political schism, with Georgia barring local governments from discriminating against gas-powered blowers. A ban on banning.

In the last legislative session, the Hawaii Attorney General’s Office told lawmakers that the proposed ban would run afoul of federal preemption because it was based on leaf blower emissions. Emissions are regulated solely by the feds.

But if the ban were based on something else, like noise, the AG offered to work with the Legislature to do that.

Please try. Or I might have to consider moving to Shallow Alto.