The gasoline fumes mixed with small particles that get kicked up are absolutely noxious and can't possibly be good for you.
This is especially egregious in dense suburban areas, where there's landscaping going on _every_ single day of the growing season.
Why only for landscaping? These fucks need to be banned, period. It was a huge mistake to ban them in vehicles while grandfathering all the old crap in. Unfortunately mechanics keep decade-old two-stroke junk alive, and spare parts aren't even banned.
If you ban that, inventory eventually depletes, and people shift to alternatives.
Similar to freon.
I would maintain a carve-out for chainsaws. Low use, specialty requirements, and electric alternatives can't replicate.
Easier said than done. You'd need to impose BATFE-style regulations and measures. You're talking about arresting people for selling partially manufactured parts, parts which they claim are actually for other things, plans for parts paired with uncut sheet metal, etc. Is a clutch illegal to manufacture if it happens to fit on some model of two-stroke motor, even though it could also be used for other things? Have fun getting tangled up in these weeds. And the only way you'd stand a chance of enforcing this is by threatening people with many years in prison for what are non-violent crimes.
People tolerate this sort of thing in the case of the BATFE because nobody really needs a machine gun, very few people have one in the first place, there's little parts commonality with other machines and because machine guns kill people in very visceral and obvious ways. But with two-stroke motors you have a whole ton of people who use these machines to save on huge amounts of labor (you're fucking with the way they put food on their table and pay rent, not just their fun at a gun range) and the alternatives are subpar. You exempt chainsaws from this, but that merely reflects what you are personally familiar with and consider reasonable. And even if the alternatives weren't subpar, you'd still be asking people to purchase new expensive machines instead of performing cheap repairs on machines they already own. Point is, the incentive and willingness to skirt two-stroke spare part bans would be much higher than with machine guns. Your bans would fail without extremely draconian enforcement.
Two stroke engine parts don't have a massive legally protected cult following like guns, nor are they high-cost many-times-repeated consumables like drugs. They're closer to antiques - some will collect them, most won't bother if they're not available.
Ban it and you'll stop major places from selling it, and minor places from widely advertising they have it. You won't stop anyone dead-set on continuing to do so, but you will stop most people because the cost will be higher and it'll be much harder to find.
With respect to the antique analogy, you have it completely backwards. Antiques are things which have outlasted their practical usefulness but are kept around anyway because people have some nostalgic or aesthetic affinity for them. Machine guns fall into this category; they are essentially fetishes (in the traditional nonsexual sense of the word). Virtually nobody is earning their living with machine guns. Two stroke motors on the other hand are in active use by thousands if not millions of people to earn a living. If they were in fact antiques, then they wouldn't be a problem in the first place because antiques aren't put to use. If you banned new production of two-stroke machines, the ones that already exist would gradually become antiques despite the existence of legal spare parts, and eventually the only people keeping them in running order would be the antique geeks who own it because they like it, not because they earn a living with it. The people who are actively earning a living with two stroke motors today are the people you [should] have a gripe with, the lawn care guys who run two-stroke leaf blowers in your neighborhood aren't antique collectors doing it for fun, they're guys trying to feed their children.
Yes they do, they're called dirtbikes and a large part of America enjoys riding them. Other countries use them in the scooter form factor. Could some of the use cases be covered by alternatives like the electric Surron? Sure. Will you successfully pass a law against them in the next 30 years? Not a chance.
Gun ownership is near 50%. It's constitutionally protected. Dirt bikes are neither.
I love the thing. I’ve felled trees that are up to 8 inches in diameter and done some real cleanup work around my property with it.
It might be possible to make something for me but the average heavy chainsaw user needs to be able to trek into the woods and spend significant time away from any power source. Furthermore, I want to be nimble and able to drop everything and run when a tree starts moving. A heavy weight strapped to my back for real tree work is a death trap.
Firefighters have even more stringent requirements for their chainsaws in highly demanding environments. If you want to convince anyone that an electric chainsaw is workable, convince them first. Everyone else will be easier.
I use my bigger chainsaws for bigger trees (just took down a mature Monterey Pine that dropped its last needle) and some Alaskan milling. The latter takes a lot of power for a single pass. I’m already lugging 22lbs just for the power head, making that electric with similar capacity to a tank or two of gas will be completely impractical in terms of weight. That’s especially so in rugged terrain.
Chainsaws are at the very corner of tools that have to be both portable, handheld, and very powerful. This means that their energy source should very dense. Lithium does not come close for the big saws.
Urban tree climbing arborists (that need a small saw to chop limbs while up in a tree) now sometimes use battery powered saws that run off of an "umbilical"- a cable off of the saw runs to a separate (backpack or other container) battery. These saws are among the smaller chainsaws (maybe a 12" bar, sized for chopping limbs). The other extreme is a saw for bucking and felling medium and large trees, which uses a MUCH more powerful motor and a 30" bar or bigger.
I would not recommend this chainsaw to the uninitiated buyer. It’s a lot of chainsaw and you only need money to buy the thing. Seriously, I’ve mentioned it to seasoned loggers and they raise an eyebrow and say as much. If I didn’t do Alaskan milling I wouldn’t have enough acreage to justify it.