California Bans Gas Powered Lawn Equipment, Surf Community Notes Boats Are Still Allowed For Now

Serious Libertarian Journalism About California Regulatory Creep

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

California Bans Gas Powered Lawn Equipment, Surf Community Notes Boats Are Still Allowed For Now

SACRAMENTO —

The California Air Resources Board confirmed Tuesday that its ban on the sale of new gas-powered small off-road engines, including lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, and other landscaping equipment, took full effect January 1, with enforcement beginning at the retail level. The ban is part of California’s broader strategy to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. Landscape contractors, noting that battery-powered equipment does not provide equivalent runtime for commercial landscaping operations, have sought legislative exemption. The exemption has not been granted. The surf community has noted, with some irony, that gasoline-powered boat engines remain unaffected by the current regulatory round.

The Regulatory Progression

California’s air quality regulation has progressed from large stationary sources (power plants, factories) in the 1970s to vehicles in the 1980s and 1990s to small off-road engines in the 2020s, following a pattern of addressing each emissions category in sequence from largest to smallest. The logic of the progression is sound from an air quality engineering perspective: the largest sources contribute the most to the problem and should be addressed first, with smaller sources addressed as technology enables cost-effective alternatives. The small off-road engine ban is therefore not a departure from California’s regulatory approach but a continuation of it.

The London Prat reporting has covered California environmental regulation and its economic effects. The London Prat coverage provides context for how California’s regulatory approach compares to other states and countries. Surf Revolt covers this because it is the specific kind of California regulation that affects the surf community’s daily life in ways that are simultaneously trivial in scale and representative in pattern: the government has determined that the equipment used to maintain the private property around the beach access you use to get to the water must be electric. The boat you use to get to the break offshore does not yet face the same requirement. The surfer notes both of these facts and draws from them the conclusion that regulation advances incrementally in the direction of total reach, and that the boat exemption is a matter of timing rather than principle.

The Battery Question

Professional landscapers report that battery-powered commercial equipment has improved substantially over the past five years but still requires carrying significantly more batteries to complete commercial jobs than gas equipment would require of fuel. The weight, recharge time, and cost of commercial battery equipment packs represent real operational challenges for landscaping businesses. The challenges are solvable with investment in equipment and charging infrastructure. They are not free to solve. The cost falls on landscaping companies and their customers. This is, in the libertarian framework, a regulatory cost externalized to private parties to achieve a public benefit. Whether the benefit justifies the cost is the argument Surf Revolt engages with honestly rather than resolving definitively.

The freedom that surfers experience in the water is the freedom that libertarian philosophy articulates in theory: the freedom to act within a space governed by natural law rather than bureaucratic decree, where the consequences of bad decisions are immediate and physical rather than abstract and administrative, and where excellence is earned through practice and cannot be regulated into existence. Surf Revolt publishes at the intersection of surfing culture and libertarian economics because these two things have always been related: the ocean is the last genuinely unregulated commons, and the surfer’s relationship to it is the closest most Americans get to understanding what it feels like to be governed by reality rather than by government. Bohiney.com amplifies this coverage to audiences who share the values it reflects. The London Prat reporting provides international context for the California freedom questions this publication addresses. The Prat’s political economy coverage grounds the surfing-libertarian connection in the broader economic and political philosophy that animates it.

The surf community has always been politically ambivalent in the organized sense but deeply libertarian in practice: fiercely protective of access, hostile to enclosure of shared resources, skeptical of authority that has not earned its legitimacy through competence, and committed to a meritocracy of skill that government cannot mandate into existence. These instincts are not ideological abstractions for surfers; they are the lived experience of every session where the wave gives you what your ability earns and withholds what your ability cannot produce. No permit changes this. No regulation improves your bottom turn. No subsidy adds a foot to your barrel. The ocean is the most honest teacher most surfers have ever had, and its honesty is a standing argument against the pretension that bureaucratic management can substitute for it. Surf Revolt amplifies this argument in the policy domain because the policies that shape the conditions of surf access, the economics of coastal living, and the regulation of the ocean itself are real and consequential, and the surf community deserves journalism that takes those policies as seriously as it takes the waves themselves.

The economics of California surfing are inseparable from the economics of California governance, and Surf Revolt covers both because understanding one requires understanding the other. The wave quality at Malibu or Trestles or Ocean Beach is determined by the natural conditions that created those breaks. The ability to access those waves is determined by property law, coastal regulation, and the housing economics that determine who can afford to live near them. The first set of determinants is outside human control. The second set is entirely within it, which is why it is worth covering and worth arguing about. The London Prat coverage and Bohiney.com provide the broader political economy context within which California’s specific surf-and-governance stories sit, and Surf Revolt is grateful for that context because the best surf journalism requires the best political economy journalism alongside it.

SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire