Your comment is way off the mark. You completely ignore the very real environmental and quality-of-life issues with small two-stroke engines and call it virtue points.
Whether it is virtue points or an important issue is irrelevant, the way it was handled was appalling and harmful.
EDIT - If you're downvoting consider this: If you and your family were running a small landscaping business and need to replace thousands of dollars of equipment, you might feel differently. Be empathetic towards those people and consider other ways to accomplish the goal. We could just as easily have banned the sale of these after a future date. There are always options to mitigate the pressure on the affected persons.
I can easily imagine they did. Who's right? People have been raising this issue for years, the idea did not just fall out of the sky. I'm unclear why the people who have been putting up with the problem for a long time need to coddle the people creating the problem any longer.
Of course if you are a homeowner that equipment will last a lot longer. (home owners buy a cheaper grade of quality in general, so you can't compare lifetimes with pro grade equipment)
I have personally seen such equipment remain in use for 15-20 years. When I was young the lawnmower we used was a monstrous Craftsman that was originally built 20 years prior. It was used year-round for that period for everything from snow removal, lawn mowing, and hauling landscaping supplies (retaining wall blocks and the like).
You would likely be surprised at the level of care and maintenance some small business owners put in.
We are talking about hand held stuff here though. While pros need equipment to last longer than home owners, there is a limit to how much mass they can deal with for something that is hand held.
Many run their business with the tools they can afford. Upon inspection, you would find that many such businesses have little to no resale value to lean on to make such an upgrade.
> They've likely had notice for a long time. Especially if they participate in their government.
What percentage of people laborers have the time to actively participate in government? I don't know the answer to this but I suspect it's shockingly small.
Are electric equivalents of the banned gas tools really that much more expensive?
The problem preventing commercial adoption is that if you want commercial user amounts of uninterrupted run time you wind up spending a fortune on batteries.
I agree that second-order effects need to be considered, certainly. That is the point of phase-in periods, which this measure had.
Is it long enough, or substantial enough? Should small businesses be able to apply for exemptions, or interest free loans for new equipment, for example? Perhaps.
It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
My only point is that the way you implement change matters and that this implementation will adversely affect the worst-off population.
> It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
No controversy there at all.
I wonder, between the two of us, who has spent more time actually making money by doing landscaping.
A large portion of these 'businesses' are 1-2 people who scraped together whatever they could to get the equipment to make a living. Many are low income. Many sacrifice heavily in their personal lives to be able to make ends meet.
The lie here is the notion that the bunch that go the route of 'organic landscaping' are representative of the entire group.
This complaint is brought up for every single environmental improvement, and it misses the concept that the risk is an imbalance, not a change which affects everyone. For example, you used to not be able to see across the street in LA on bad smog days – and I remember plenty of people insisting that doing anything about that would devastate the economy, and yet California seems to be not exactly an impoverished wasteland.