>Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.
TIL that was the same person. What a legacy. Whole-world-altering inventions (both in being spread literally everywhere because they were so effective, and in the negative ways) that close together is amazing.
I sometimes wonder if such coincidences are because the person was a time traveler, or alien, or some such, trying to alter things, steer things in some way..
I wrote about this fellow back in 2007[1]. In 1935 he was asked to make predictions about what chemistry/science will accomplish by 2035. Some are pretty wild, but others are spot-on, such as:
• Interplanetary travel, involving the production of a substance that will produce more energy per pound than is required to lift that pound out of the Earth’s gravitational field.
• The end of visiting; people will stay at home and call on their friends by television.
> Interplanetary travel, involving the production of a substance that will produce more energy per pound than is required to lift that pound out of the Earth’s gravitational field.
Arthur C. Clarke had some words to say about this persistent idea in The Promise Of Space.
You don't actually want to lift your pound of fuel <out of earth's gravitational field>, that would be useless. You actually want to burn it as early as possible to lift a pound of something else (preferably cargo).
Every second you burn it sooner, the less high you need to lift it. Ideally you'd burn all your fuel on the ground in second 0. Sadly, releasing that much energy all at once tends to lead to Rapid Undesired Disassembly. Hence space rockets burn for a little longer (but still as quickly as possible).
The absolute terrible thing about leaded gasoline is that they were already aware of several other additives (including ethanol, IIRC) that have the desired anti-knocking properties. But they went with tetraethyl lead anyway because it is cheaper and provided a few cents more profit per gallon.
A cent was worth more back then than it does now, but still :-(
They also were aware very early on of the health risks lead caused. Midgley himself suffered from lead poisoning. Then they poisoned the world for those few cents per gallon.
I would also emphasize a more social issue to this. There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term. Beyond the endless corporate lobbying and sold out scientists/politicians working to convince everybody that leaded fuel was 100% safe, I think there was also probably a mindset of many in society that 'Well, if leaded fuel is so poisonous and I'm breathing it in everyday, then why am I perfectly fine?' And with such "logic" dismiss any concerns about its safety.
The Nation's story on it dives much deeper. There was an out and out panic about lead and leaded gasoline in the 1920s that GM and Ethyl/du Pont had to squash, which Midgely happily participated in. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...
A gimmick account dedicated to lead advocacy. Interesting. Could you source any scientific papers (or even a schizo blog post!) we could read through? Because your Venezuelan eyesight anecdote is not very convincing.
I don't follow. #2 is on nicotine exposure, and #3 concluded lead exposure is bad.
"Conclusion: Lead poison has a great effect on vision and eye health of the workers, its lead to decrease of vision result in development amblyopia, it also has influence on ocular media and causes severe allergic reaction Thus, all the workers in this field should wear the protection tools provided in the factory, and there is a critical need for examining their ocular health annually."
It's infinitely more convenient to assume that the leaders in the past were evil and the masses of the past ignorant than it is to assume they weren't let alone assume they were mostly just like us.
It must be nice to be able to make those assumptions and believe them...
Midgley had to be treated for lead poisoning following one of his demonstrations of how safe leaded fuel was. The fact leaded fuel was unsafe would not have come as a surprise to him or anybody else familiar with its development and risks. I don't give much of any consideration to good or evil, but I do to ethics and values. And our society's leaders, corporate and political, have been woefully absent of them for some time, in a trend that seems to be clearly rapidly worsening.
So in that regard I do agree that people of times past were, more or less, the same as today. Yet even the most cursory glance of our history, outside of what is taught in history class, is something that would emphasize that that belief is anything but nice to hold!
They also knew it was toxic, but deliberately put on displays claiming that it wasn’t, even midgley would pour it over his hands despite knowing the danger and intentionally avoiding it in all other cases.
They also used medical testing to mislead: showing people could consume it and lead wouldn’t be detected in their urine. Apparently that showed it was safe, and no one said “then where did the lead go?”.
Happily he also invented the machine that killed him so at least he was egalitarian in his harm.
The fact that it has always been there casts a great doubt on the claims about its toxicity. It can be found through the ages in human remains and in geological remains that clearly predate people.
> There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects.
> The body stores lead in the teeth and bones, where it accumulates over time. Lead stored in bone may be released into the blood during pregnancy, thus exposing the fetus. Undernourished children are more susceptible to lead because their bodies absorb more lead if other nutrients, such as calcium or iron, are lacking.
It's a lie. The effects are always beneficial except in extreme doses. No dose that makes no difference is exactly what you would expect from a nutrient.
Yes, iron overload seems to interfere with lead. Calcium not so much, it seems it rather makes lead used for building more bone. Licking lead causes cravings for calcium rich food.
Where's the evidence that those proteins need "activating"? The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized.
For that matter, activating and poisoning aren't even mutually exclusive, you can run an engine too fast and burn it, work out till you get rhabdo and your P looks like T, etc.
To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible.
The neanderthals probably ate stuff from lead rich soil or something, that doesn't prove it wasn't harmful. Lots of stuff is just mildly bad, it kills some people, sickens others, but not enough to affect population growth so Darwin continues not caring while people die and suffer.
Maybe they had some lead containing tools or medicines or something, of the sort we can avoid now because of safety standards.
Our ancestors were exposed to lots of unhealthy stuff, including battle axes, most of us would prefer to minimize it to below that level, and continually improve things.
>The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized.
We're arguing what the 'default' is. I'm arguing the default state is with lead. It would be strange for a protein to evolve to get so easily activated by a toxin.
>To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible.
I thing it's completely uncontroversial that the current typical human health is at the historic rock bottom.
There is no reason theoretical or not to believe it is toxic in the first place, except for the strange claim that the body uses it in error.
>The neanderthals probably ate stuff from lead rich soil or something, that doesn't prove it wasn't harmful.
That's an absurd claim, and really grasping at straws, don't you think? Mote that the remains aren't many. It isn't that they sieved through thousands of teeth to find a couple that were poisoned.
I don't think it's uncontroversial at all. People's health is better for lots of reasons unrelated to lead, so it's very hard to compare. We no longer die of pathogens and injuries as much, even COVID is not as bad as some historical plagues.
There's new hazards that didn't exist then, but a some of them are exactly due to the body doing harmful things with surplus nutrition, that's what obesity is.
Toxins activate things all the time. Just because it can be activated doesn't prove it should be activated at any more than the baseline level, and some things might be better off activated less.
There's various papers on "ultratrace elements" and a few old ones on "lead deficiency" talking about impaired lipid absorption, and reduced Hct and Hb(Isn't lower but still normal hemoglobin a good thing?) but people are likely already getting more lead than 100 years ago.
Even if there's some role for lead and the papers aren't getting it wrong, everyone's probably getting more than the optimal point. Unless they study that optimal point it could be above, the same as, or well below what our ancestors got.
Or perhaps the optimal point has even changed. Maybe lead helped them have Moe Hb, which helped them persistence hunt or something, but now we don't need any boosts like that to meet typical or even optimal levels of excercise, and it just puts unneeded stress on the heart.
"baseline" meaning "the minimal level of activation one gets without any currently-uncommon exogenous thing that activates it.".
There are lots of experiments where they give mice a gene for reduced function of something, or knock something out entirely and they actually live longer.
To me that shows that some functions might exist for increased performance or endurance, to a degree no longer needed in civilized society, at the cost of more disease risk, and we might not necessarily want everything firing on all cylinders.
Without further study, I don't see why we'd assume that activating proteins indicates it's a good thing.
That lead thing is from one specific study in Japan. They(Like most places) did not have a long life expectancy before modernization, and they mentioned they probably got it from white lead used by their mothers, which would not be a global universal thing.
Their life expectancy was also rather short back then in seems, probably for reasons unrelated to lead, but that still means it's close to impossible to say whether they had good nutrition or not, since even absolutely terrible diets might not have effects for a decade, unless there's enough total food for obesity to happen.
Single-purpose accounts aren't allowed on HN. We don't want flamewars either, which is what you've been creating and fueling in this thread.
I think it's weirdly interesting that you're advocating for lead as nutrient, but accounts that post this kind of thing usually overdo it, since they have a pre-existing agenda and are not using the site for curiosity. We may need lead, but we don't need that, so please stop.
I know you really mean it! but that doesn't change any of the above. In fact it makes it more important, since it's harder to stop posting like this when you really mean it.
It's difficult and frustrating to represent a minority view on the internet, especially one as rare as yours, which the vast majority of the audience are simply not going to understand or accept. What we often see is that contrarian/minority commenters compensate for this frustration by digging in and becoming sort of fixated on the point, intensifying their advocacy for the truth as they see it.
This can get you sucked into a loop where you keep turning up the volume and frequency of your posts in order to try to get a hearing, or to lash out at the majority, who often respond unfairly,—but all this only intensifies the resistance and outrage the majority comes back with. The way this dynamic ends is that we have to ban the account that's provoking the continued conflict—even if they're the one who is right (which sometimes, of course, a contrarian is). That sucks, but the only alternative would be flamewars everywhere, and that would suck worse.
The only thing I know that can help with this is accepting in one's heart that humans are nearly entirely wrong about nearly everything, and making peace with it. For this it can help to realize that it's probably as true of oneself as it is of anyone else. Also, people don't choose their views—for the most part we're conditioned by our backgrounds. Those don't move much, so it's hard for anyone to change their views, and it's certainly not going to happen in response to an internet commenter who appears fixated on a topic.
So it's not in your own interest to post like this, because it will actually entrench the others in their opposing view. If you allow yourself to keep upping the ante, you end up discrediting whatever truth you're trying to advocate. The only way to avoid this to deflate 90% if not 99% of the pressure you're putting on the topic—which I know is not easy, when you probably have many reasons to feel strongly about it.
Here are some past explanations I've made to other users in similar situations, in case any of it is helpful:
Thanks for writing this, Daniel. Your cool-headedness and willingness to spend time defusing an conflict is an inspiring example. Favourited this wise comment.
Thanks also Weneedlead for actually trying to argue your case in a relatively civil way after I and others attacked it, and I'm sorry if I raised the temperature. I think those of your arguments which I actually read are highly unconvincing (because toxins usually are functional analogues -- e.g. of calcium in the case of lead), but I freely admit that I'm biased against giving them a fair hearing, because a priori I predict an extremely low chance of it providing me any benefit for my time spent. Doesn't mean I'm absolutely 100% certain you're wrong.
FWIW I flagged a comment because of the potential harm in spreading misinformation, not because it was uncivil, however in hindsight maybe in a forum like this where people have proper debates it's better to discuss than to moderate misinformation.
>The only thing I know that can help with this is accepting in one's heart that humans are nearly entirely wrong about nearly everything, and making peace with it.
I can't. Being wrong means that people exterminate themselves. It isn't something meaningless that doesn't matter.
>Also, people don't choose their views—for the most part we're conditioned by our backgrounds.
Ironically, this appears to be another symptom, just like the intensification of their existing beliefs by contrary evidence. Which also makes them intensify their belief in ever increasing progress even as the majority turns into savages.
> Most people are critically malnourished, so it holds on to any that it can get.
This is not how chemistry works. The body will use (catalyze) what you give it, but the more reactive substances are used quicker and in greater abundance.
Also who are these people that are critically malnourished? In the western world at least, we have access to all the vitamins and minerals we need just by way of the food we eat even on a relatively poor diet.
People didn't invent heart disease or brain damage or bleeding to death either, none of those are healthy.
The body might absorb all kinds of shit that isn't healthy, including carbon monoxide and pure americium, just like a computer holds onto malware and a lake holds onto PFAS.
Even most scientifically proven essential nutrients are poison if you have more than the optimal amount.
That's literally what getting fat is, the body holding onto things that have no benefit because of some chemical pathway left over from when we didn't have refrigerators and might need to walk for 4 days without food.
Evolution didn't give people a very effective "stop absorbing calories" function so why would we expect a "stop absorbing lead" function to be much better?
People didn't make it but people moved it where it could be taken in, and processed it into more active compounds.
Your body will also hold on to DDT, nicotine, or even radioactive iodine. The only thing that shows is that it is quite bad at getting rid of harmful substances.
The most interesting to me is the correlation between the delinquency among children and teens, and the years of introduction of tetraethyl lead in gasoline for anti-knocking properties.
I read somewhere that Thomas Midgley Jr could be considered, in modern history, to be the organism with highest impactful on earth with his invention of Chlorofurocarbons and their impact on the ozone layers.
But how many gallons were sold with lead added? I would imagine that is quite substantial number, so in the end we are talking about large sums of money...
The “couple of cents” seemed like an off the cuff remark to indicate that leaded gas was less expensive than alternatives, but I would be interested in hearing about this delta as a percent rather than a fixed cost. Given inflation, gas price fluctuations, and the sheer volume in which fuel was sold, measuring it as a “couple of cents” is completely meaningless.
It's hard to have any conclusive number on this, it's not only about inflation etc. but also the cost of alternative ways of achieving the required octane (e.g. increasing production of reformate or alkylate, or the refinery buying external blendstocks like ethanol or MTBE), which varies a lot over time (due to technical advancements) and place (what kind of equipment does a refinery have installed), etc.
From a 1998 article (https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/d3706d00-3d97-495d-8b8c-.... ) it estimates between $0.01-$0.03/liter for lead removal. US gasoline prices in 1990-2000 were at around $1.20/gallon which works out to about $0.32/liter. Taking the middle value of $0.02/liter for lead removal that would be around 6%. Just as a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I think in reality in many places that cost delta at pump the is lower since the usage of ethanol as an octane enhancer shifts the cost to various agricultural subsidy programs.
Wapo article from 1984 [0] asserts that 85-octane nonleaded gasoline was consistently about 2 cents cheaper to make than 87-octane leaded gasoline.
That said, that was with numerous advancements over the preceding 60 years which most likely would never have happened if we hadn't developed engines capable of taking advantage of high-octane fuels.
"But, as DeMuth noted, the EPA study is concerned about total costs and benefits to society, not just to one group. The study makes no attempt to predict what would happen to prices at the pump. It points out instead that the cost of manufacturing 87-octane unleaded gasoline, according to market prices, is consistently less than 2 cents a gallon more than for making 89-octane leaded gasoline. Average pump prices are about 7 cents more, however."
"The DOE model estimates that at current lead levels (1.10 gplg) the marginal manufacturing cost differential between unleaded and leaded regular grades of gasoline is less than two cents per gallon. Retail prices, however, diverge by an average of about seven cents per gallon (Weekly Petroleum Status Report, 1984, various issues)."
7 cents per gallon is right around that 2 cents per liter that you cite, naturally.
A gallon of gasoline back in 1930 (or 1925 for that matter, pre-depression) cost about 20 cents. So, even 2 cents per gallon would be a 10% savings.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/om030621b has some points of comparison (as well as a lot more historical context of the research that led Midgley & co to leaded gasoline if you're interested).
For what it's worth, per Table 1, ethanol is not anywhere near as effective as tetraethyllead -- it has an effectiveness of 0.1 per mol, vs TEL having a value of 118. Even when normalizing by molar mass (since TEL is a much heavier compound), TEL is still ~100x more effective than ethanol.
"... iodine had a few slight drawbacks. It added over a dollar to the cost of a gallon of fuel and we were afraid that would be considered a trifle excessive by most motorists."
"Further studies with more dilute solutions showed that a one-fortieth of one percent solution of tetraethyllead was equivalent in knock inhibition to 1.3% aniline in kerosene."
"The first public sale of Ethyl gasoline (the name given it by Kettering) occurred on February 1, 1923 in Dayton, OH at 25 cents per gallon (regular gas cost 21 cents per gallon) (Figure 8) before large-scale production had started."
Yes, they never get to the stage when you talk nonsense when they drink alcohol. (they can't readily tell, it seems, they need to test you in some way)
I'm saying that the majority is now psychopaths.
I'm still more inclined that the drop in IQ is an artifact, but even if intelligence is improved in some way, it's useless when the person is asocial.
It’s very hard to tell the difference between both your comments and conspiratorial ramblings (psychopaths have an unnaturally high alcohol tolerance?), hence the flagging and downvoting.
It’s also hard to tell what your point actually is. I’d advise re-thinking how you structure your thoughts or writing.
A cent was worth more back then, but I guarantee you any oil company today that could save a cent per gallon at the cost of human lives would do it without hesitation.
> Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer with CFCs – but while these dire consequences were unintended… could they have been anticipated?
> Most aviation would never have happened if this guy hadn't invented leaded gasoline.
Duh, of course it would. Aviation gasoline would have used other methods of increasing octane, and/or then we'd have made do with slightly lower octane avgas. And engines would have been designed accordingly.
The only reason why getting rid of leaded avgas has been a 40 year saga is that they have been chasing the dream of a 1:1 replacement that would require no changes to 100% of existing aircraft. Now it seems they finally have such a fuel in G100UL, we'll see if and how quickly usage of it expands to replace leaded avgas.
There are a substantial number of existing aircraft that are safe to operate on a subset of automotive gasoline (93 octane, ethanol-free). The FAA says to do so legally requires the purchase of a supplemental type certificate for thousands of dollars.
There's no inspection or modification of the aircraft. It's just a piece of paper. The FAA could fix the problem for those aircraft with the stroke of a pen.
Mistake was anti-proliferation. If every country had nukes wold would be much more peaceful place. Would Iraq or Afganistan got involved if they had capability to deliver nuke to fight enemy combatants in NYC or DC?
> If every country had nukes wold would be much more peaceful place.
It does not work. Countries would still fight conventional wars, because not everything is worth escalating. Even in your example. They are being invaded and are at risk of losing their country (well, they were at some point anyway). Do you reckon they’d throw a nuke at the US and so be absolutely certain to lose everything they have rather than fight a conventional war and having a chance at taking their country back?
On the other hand, proliferation has real risks in terms of radionuclides ending up in things like terrorist groups.
Overall, it makes as much sense as the “if teachers had guns schools would be safer” talking points.
Question is would USA risk direct conflict with a country if they could actually suffer some actual losses of combatants on their own soil? They might, but I think it would substantially lower the risk.
Same applies to most current conflicts.
And about non traditional fights, maybe there would be less of those as big countries would be more careful about their actions.
Also I believe that if every school kid had a gun there would be lot less bullying. As they would be able to instantly produce credible self-defence when the society entirely fails to protect them. And they would be fully in moral right to answer with reasonable force to such actions.
> Also I believe that if every school kid had a gun there would be lot less bullying
Yes, and a lot more shootings. IMO the same applies to nukes. If every country had nukes then they'd be less conventional warfare, but a lot more nuclear bombings. It only takes one person to decide it's a good idea.
> would USA risk direct conflict with a country if they could actually suffer some actual losses of combatants on their own soil?
That’s a very interesting question! So much of the US foreign policy is predicated on the fact that there will never, ever be a war on American soil. It would definitely change the risk dessinent and the political acceptability of aggressive foreign policy.
Nuclear weapons really have not killed that many people. They’re big and scary, but not more dangerous than the stuff we spew in the atmosphere all the time and that keeps killing millions each year.
Even though the effect of leaded gasoline is small on any specific individual on average, the cumulated effect over ~a century is staggering.
I'm not sure how to respond to that comment, which I find profoundly shocking and depressing. I've read some HN comments before which for some reason suggest a large-scale nuclear "war" wouldn't be so bad, but..this one seems even much worse, for some reason. I don't get it. I don't get how anyone could believe or write that.
Anything I could write seems so obvious. I can't think. I think I need a break from HN for a while. You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.
Indeed, it is. There is nothing more depressing than what we are doing to ourselves and to our own world.
> I've read some HN comments before which for some reason suggest a large-scale nuclear "war" wouldn't be so bad
No mistake, it would be absolutely terrible, country- if not civilisation-ending. None of this is any good. It is just that nuclear weapons and our current way of life are on two opposite sides of a risk spectrum: nuclear apocalypse is a very improbable event with huge consequences; our industry is a fact of life that has been more or less silently killing indiscriminately, almost innocent because we don’t see its effects as huge, memorable events. A nuclear winter might kill hundreds of millions if it happens; we’ve already killed much more than that with non-nuclear means.
So yeah, nuclear weapons are terrible, and I completely disagree with the other poster who said everyone should have them. I just wish we would see the harm we do every day as clearly as the harm we could do in exceptional circumstances.
> You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.
I think the post has been downvoted. I don’t have all the detail but I think the score has fluctuated a bit. If it can be of comfort to you.
Not so one-sided, Fritz Haber [0] is another very interesting chemist. Got a Nobel prize for the process to synthesize ammonia (modern fertilizer production), but then also got side tracked with the 1st world war and became the father of chemical warfare
For people in to historically themed power metal, the Swedish metal band Sabaton have a song about him - https://youtu.be/DxkeOkaVRLo and their collab with a historian, Indy Neidell (of The Great War and WW2 fame) to tell the history behind their songs also has a video about him https://youtu.be/UadfxEJKVM8 .
you picked a very bad news source. this reporting has been debunked. they failed to control for increased lead in environment. neighborhoods NOT under flight paths but in the same area also have higher lead levels. this is sponsored by land developers hoping to close KRHV
Do you have a citation for the debunking? The WA state legislature is trying to push through a bunch of unfunded mandates of dubious effectiveness on airports based on this study.
Always be skeptical of individuals who claim things are debunked without citing their sources.
Also, it is true that neighborhoods near the airport not in the flight path also have higher lead levels than average, but I'm not sure how that helps the case - there is elevated lead levels near airports, which can adversely affect your health.
Blood lead levels are overwhelmingly affected by local exposure, basically the history of lead use where you live, work and your food is from.
While leaded avgas is not great the FAA just approved a replacement and I'm sure it will be in use quickly because "hurr durr muh lead" is the rallying cry of obnoxious suburbanites who just bought a house beside an airport and now want it shut down and everyone involved in general aviation has a large incentive to silence that screeching.
Now, before any jerks show up to strawman me as endorsing lead exposure so they can bust out their favorite "no safe level" quip that they love to circle jerk it to, I'm not. I'm saying that while the effect is measurable it's not meaningful in light of the fact that you or anyone else's lead exposure is overwhelmingly dominated by local sources.
The problem with this line of plausible but non-scientific thought is that you base it solely on 'blood lead levels' as though they would be constant, without explaining the process taken to test. The latter part is critically important with heavy metals.
Heavy metals in general never stay in the blood very long, the body binds them as quickly as it can, and the only way to accurately test involves taking a chelator first (to cause it to release into the blood stream) and then testing for acute poisoning (by causing it). There may be newer methods that have been developed since, but as of 2008 that was true.
Anyone who has suffered mercury or lead poisoning that was diagnosed by a medical professional would be aware of this, which is why there is no safe level, it bioaccumulates, and is a time-bomb for acute poisoning if it ever gets released.
Incidentally cilantro is a powerful chelator, and is used in food. Many people who have suffered poisoning get powerful headaches and other poisoning symptoms which can mimic many symptoms on the ADD/Autism/ADHD spectrum when eating this food, and often themselves don't know why.
For some reasons, every area in close proximity to airports with moderate to high piston engine aircraft traffic have exceptional high local exposure (according to EPA). There could be a correlation or even a causation link. EPA at least think so, which is why they changed the rules in 2008 by issuing a new minimum standard.
The new replacement fuels are good, but they have one general large drawback. They require a recertification of the engine/frame of the plane. According to the lobby group AOPA, it will cost the industry in excess of $150 billion annually in the US alone.
In response, EPA issued an statement that there will be no phase-out date for planes to meet the new minimum standard, saying that it is the FAA responsibility to issue a process so that airplanes fulfills the new minimum standard. The FAA in turn said that regulating lead in avgas is an EPA responsibility, and they will not issue a phase-out date for planes to meet the new minimum standard.
That has been the last word from both agencies since 2010.
> The new replacement fuels are good, but they have one general large drawback. They require a recertification of the engine/frame of the plane. According to the lobby group AOPA, it will cost the industry in excess of $150 billion annually in the US alone.
Also (at least in the UK), UL91 (the unleaded-alternative for some aeroplanes) is more expensive than 100LL. E.g. looking at a nearby (GA) airport, the price for 100LL is £2.22/litre and UL91 is £2.60. You can sometimes use Mogas (literally automotive unleaded) but this has some temperature restrictions due to the vapour point.
That's not surprising when you factor in fuel procedures for pilots dealing with mechanical or other malfunctions that require the plane to land with a mostly full tank.
Since this is HN, there’s always the contrarian comment that goes “actually these things are awesome and you should be ashamed for not respecting them” — even if the topic is leaded gasoline and CFCs.
You can never know if that comment will be at the top, or showdead-only at the very bottom. That’s what makes it so exciting to open the comments.
He was horrible... but the fact anyone actually listened to him is what really creeps me out.
One evil man I can understand, you ignore him or put him in jail if he does a crime, it doesn't keep people up at night the same way, although it's disgusting.
That same tendency just kind of lurking dormant in millions, means even democracy might not stop it.
I read a short story (don’t remember the author), the gist of which was an a future where time travel is possible and accessible. There was a group tasked with cleaning up time travel mistakes. Their motto was Everyone always tries to kill Hitler. But this leads to a future armageddon so they have to keep undoing it.
Wrong in so many ways, there was, of course, extensive study and dedicated satellite instrumentation looking into all the issues you raised.
eg:
> Nobody explained why the hole was in Antarctica despite almost all the CFC being produced and used in the northern hemisphere.
There is both an Artic and Antartic ozone hole, as gases eventually circulate globally both poles receive nearly the same volume of (man made) precursor chemicals .. however the Antartic is typically colder in spring and the ozone destroying reaction is tempreture sensitive.
> This is nothing more than a monopoly which continues to this day with DuPont, Honeywell, and Arkema at the head of it. You're just a brainless sissy.
This Cautionary Tales podcast episode talks about him [0].
Both were invented in the service of DuPont. CFC at least helped making refrigeration safer and helped getting it to the masses. Leaded gasoline on the other hand was always known as a bad idea.
In both cases though, DuPont fought back hard to prevent bans of these solutions. They rather kill the planet than their profits.
Suitably enough he killed himself with another one of his inventions that used pulleys to overcome mobility issues due to his Polio infection and helped him get out of bed. I guess health and safety was really not his thing.
Polio was absolutely terrible for those who had it. I wouldn’t blame him for having it. Or for ending it. However, for other reasons, I agree with you.
Interestingly most cases are asymptomatic or extremely low acute consequence and the problems only emerge years later. There is nothing to be learned from this and we should not give it any more thought.
Propane is a very good refrigerant for many common uses like AC, heat pumps, or refrigerators, yes. But yes, AFAIU initially CFC's were hailed as a significant safety advancement and quickly replaced older refrigerants that were poisonous (ammonia) or flammable (hydrocarbons). But subsequently we've become better at making refrigerant machinery that needs less refrigerant and is less prone to leakage, and the natural refrigerants have made a comeback as subsequent generations of the flourocarbon family refrigerants have been banned (CFC bans, F-gas regulations etc.) and become more and more expensive.
That right here is the point. With commercial units, you can be relatively sure only trained professionals will touch it, it will be somewhat decently maintained, and installation will be done with decent quality. With anything consumer-retail? As a manufacturer, you'll have to include absolutely ridiculously dumb people into your risk estimation, and you don't want to risk headlines like "Exploding brand XYZ AC unit kills family in house fire" because the father who had installed it caused a leak in the propane circuit - people won't care about that distinction, they'll see your brand as tarnished and unsafe.
Don't forget decades of advancements in manufacturing procedures, engineering, tighter tolerances, improved materials science, and so on that have happened to help ensure the propane remains in the coolant circuit.
Speaking of DuPont, they also were among the first to introduce PFAs with Teflon - although in this case I don't think anybody suspected what implications that may have at the time...
I'm going to reiterate a point that needs to be repeated very loudly, as often as possible:
Corporations are malignant paperclip maximizers. We are already in an "AI apocalypse". How many people did leaded fuel kill? Lead exposure makes people stupid and violent - how many wars did it indirectly contribute to, how far back has society been held? That's one corporation. One!!
"Corporations bad" is a sort of tired left wing trope at this point but I think that's because the scale of the problem is difficult to wrap one's head around - it's hard to imagine an alternate world. But we didn't choose to inhabit a world run by corporations, it just happened through a process of blind natural selection, and it will kill us all unless we do something about it now. Our current governments are clearly inadequate - we need to be consciously, deliberately, constructing alternate ways of organizing ourselves, as rapidly as possible, to combat the threat of this new lifeform. And make no mistake, it is combat - they will fight back! They will fight back on a level so subtle and insidious that you will be convinced that there is no fight, or that you are powerless, or that the anti-corporate movement is on the wrong side.
What can you do about it? You're an HN reader, you can probably make websites. Build something designed to facilitate collective action. Bring out the best in people. Make it so that when we all know that something is bad, no fucking corporation can pay off the government to be allowed to do it anyway.
You explain that by understanding that nobility had the resources and influence to get utensils and other kitchenware that were ceramics decorated with lead containing glaze and metals that contained lead. You have causality entirely backwards, eating lead does not somehow turn someone into nobility. That's an absurd conclusion
I can't reply to you because you've posted such nonsense that all your comments are dead. Being born into nobility has nothing to do with anything as people who dine with nobility will use the same utensils. I'm not sure how you don't understand something so simple. Almost like it's deliberately disingenuous. Not to mention you haven't posted a shred of evidence that any of your assertions are even accurate
It's almost as if a governing body should exist that's by the people, for the people, wherein corporations are not equivalent to more powerful people....
Yes, and? Yes, governments are supposed to protect us. No, they are not adequate to the task[0] - they were designed before this became an obvious problem. We need to move forward from simply complaining about it, and think structurally.
[0] (although that varies by country and having a government is almost invariably better than not having one)
There’s a line of thought that connects the use of leaded gasoline with US crime rates. [1]
The idea is that exposure to lead causes people to have problems that lead to violent behavior later in life. The evidence presented includes the correlation observed between the removal of lead from gasoline and a sharp fall in crime rates 20 years later.
A similar link has been suggested for abortion. The drop in crime rate starting in 1993 happened pretty much exactly 20 years after Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973. It is called the "Donohue–Levitt hypothesis".
Interesting that there's a particular political party in the US who likes to bang the drum about crime and law and also wants to ban abortion. Gotta have something to get you votes!
If you're interested in this kind of narrative of brilliant scientists accidentally making things worse, I strongly recommend When We Cease to Understand the World [1] by Benjamin Labatut. A brilliant hybrid fiction/non-fiction book that goes into the story of Fritz Haber and other scientists whose inventions had an unexpected and negative impact on history.
153 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadBut, as a joke, on potential EA cause area would be banning everything Thomas Midgely invented, just to be sure.
TIL that was the same person. What a legacy. Whole-world-altering inventions (both in being spread literally everywhere because they were so effective, and in the negative ways) that close together is amazing.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197227
• Interplanetary travel, involving the production of a substance that will produce more energy per pound than is required to lift that pound out of the Earth’s gravitational field.
• The end of visiting; people will stay at home and call on their friends by television.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/
At least gravity isn't high enough to keep all chemical rockets earthbound.
Arthur C. Clarke had some words to say about this persistent idea in The Promise Of Space.
You don't actually want to lift your pound of fuel <out of earth's gravitational field>, that would be useless. You actually want to burn it as early as possible to lift a pound of something else (preferably cargo).
Every second you burn it sooner, the less high you need to lift it. Ideally you'd burn all your fuel on the ground in second 0. Sadly, releasing that much energy all at once tends to lead to Rapid Undesired Disassembly. Hence space rockets burn for a little longer (but still as quickly as possible).
A cent was worth more back then than it does now, but still :-(
Local rationality is a thing. It is not all a plot to suck money out. He believed his own shit.
"Conclusion: Lead poison has a great effect on vision and eye health of the workers, its lead to decrease of vision result in development amblyopia, it also has influence on ocular media and causes severe allergic reaction Thus, all the workers in this field should wear the protection tools provided in the factory, and there is a critical need for examining their ocular health annually."
11 out of the 76 short term exposed workers had myopia, while 10 out of 124 long term exposed workers had myopia, which is much less.
Which moves him from the category of buffoon to evil.
It must be nice to be able to make those assumptions and believe them...
So in that regard I do agree that people of times past were, more or less, the same as today. Yet even the most cursory glance of our history, outside of what is taught in history class, is something that would emphasize that that belief is anything but nice to hold!
Doesn't US regulation still approach novel chemicals with a "Safe until proven otherwise" stance? Surely this doesn't help.
They also used medical testing to mislead: showing people could consume it and lead wouldn’t be detected in their urine. Apparently that showed it was safe, and no one said “then where did the lead go?”.
Happily he also invented the machine that killed him so at least he was egalitarian in his harm.
The answer might help us predict where to find much or little of it, though.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3485653/ says
> There is no such level of lead that appears to be necessary or beneficial to the body and no “safe” level of exposure to lead has been found.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poison... says
> There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects.
> The body stores lead in the teeth and bones, where it accumulates over time. Lead stored in bone may be released into the blood during pregnancy, thus exposing the fetus. Undernourished children are more susceptible to lead because their bodies absorb more lead if other nutrients, such as calcium or iron, are lacking.
Lead activates the proteins it supoosedly poisons: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12425341_Inorganic_...
Yes, teeth and bones use most of the lead that you consume. But why is there lead in the teeth of neandethals? https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2018/250000-year-o...
Yes, iron overload seems to interfere with lead. Calcium not so much, it seems it rather makes lead used for building more bone. Licking lead causes cravings for calcium rich food.
For that matter, activating and poisoning aren't even mutually exclusive, you can run an engine too fast and burn it, work out till you get rhabdo and your P looks like T, etc.
To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible.
The neanderthals probably ate stuff from lead rich soil or something, that doesn't prove it wasn't harmful. Lots of stuff is just mildly bad, it kills some people, sickens others, but not enough to affect population growth so Darwin continues not caring while people die and suffer.
Maybe they had some lead containing tools or medicines or something, of the sort we can avoid now because of safety standards.
Our ancestors were exposed to lots of unhealthy stuff, including battle axes, most of us would prefer to minimize it to below that level, and continually improve things.
We're arguing what the 'default' is. I'm arguing the default state is with lead. It would be strange for a protein to evolve to get so easily activated by a toxin.
>To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible.
I thing it's completely uncontroversial that the current typical human health is at the historic rock bottom.
There is no reason theoretical or not to believe it is toxic in the first place, except for the strange claim that the body uses it in error.
>The neanderthals probably ate stuff from lead rich soil or something, that doesn't prove it wasn't harmful.
That's an absurd claim, and really grasping at straws, don't you think? Mote that the remains aren't many. It isn't that they sieved through thousands of teeth to find a couple that were poisoned.
There's new hazards that didn't exist then, but a some of them are exactly due to the body doing harmful things with surplus nutrition, that's what obesity is.
Toxins activate things all the time. Just because it can be activated doesn't prove it should be activated at any more than the baseline level, and some things might be better off activated less.
There's various papers on "ultratrace elements" and a few old ones on "lead deficiency" talking about impaired lipid absorption, and reduced Hct and Hb(Isn't lower but still normal hemoglobin a good thing?) but people are likely already getting more lead than 100 years ago.
Even if there's some role for lead and the papers aren't getting it wrong, everyone's probably getting more than the optimal point. Unless they study that optimal point it could be above, the same as, or well below what our ancestors got.
Or perhaps the optimal point has even changed. Maybe lead helped them have Moe Hb, which helped them persistence hunt or something, but now we don't need any boosts like that to meet typical or even optimal levels of excercise, and it just puts unneeded stress on the heart.
We do have studies like this showing detrimental effects to people with increased lead, even within the typical range(https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.106.6...)
Again. Can't you see it's a circular argument? How did you determine that it's the 'baseline'?
>people are likely getting more lead than 100 years ago.
People used to get much more. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
There are lots of experiments where they give mice a gene for reduced function of something, or knock something out entirely and they actually live longer.
To me that shows that some functions might exist for increased performance or endurance, to a degree no longer needed in civilized society, at the cost of more disease risk, and we might not necessarily want everything firing on all cylinders.
Without further study, I don't see why we'd assume that activating proteins indicates it's a good thing.
That lead thing is from one specific study in Japan. They(Like most places) did not have a long life expectancy before modernization, and they mentioned they probably got it from white lead used by their mothers, which would not be a global universal thing.
Their life expectancy was also rather short back then in seems, probably for reasons unrelated to lead, but that still means it's close to impossible to say whether they had good nutrition or not, since even absolutely terrible diets might not have effects for a decade, unless there's enough total food for obesity to happen.
I think it's weirdly interesting that you're advocating for lead as nutrient, but accounts that post this kind of thing usually overdo it, since they have a pre-existing agenda and are not using the site for curiosity. We may need lead, but we don't need that, so please stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's difficult and frustrating to represent a minority view on the internet, especially one as rare as yours, which the vast majority of the audience are simply not going to understand or accept. What we often see is that contrarian/minority commenters compensate for this frustration by digging in and becoming sort of fixated on the point, intensifying their advocacy for the truth as they see it.
This can get you sucked into a loop where you keep turning up the volume and frequency of your posts in order to try to get a hearing, or to lash out at the majority, who often respond unfairly,—but all this only intensifies the resistance and outrage the majority comes back with. The way this dynamic ends is that we have to ban the account that's provoking the continued conflict—even if they're the one who is right (which sometimes, of course, a contrarian is). That sucks, but the only alternative would be flamewars everywhere, and that would suck worse.
The only thing I know that can help with this is accepting in one's heart that humans are nearly entirely wrong about nearly everything, and making peace with it. For this it can help to realize that it's probably as true of oneself as it is of anyone else. Also, people don't choose their views—for the most part we're conditioned by our backgrounds. Those don't move much, so it's hard for anyone to change their views, and it's certainly not going to happen in response to an internet commenter who appears fixated on a topic.
So it's not in your own interest to post like this, because it will actually entrench the others in their opposing view. If you allow yourself to keep upping the ante, you end up discrediting whatever truth you're trying to advocate. The only way to avoid this to deflate 90% if not 99% of the pressure you're putting on the topic—which I know is not easy, when you probably have many reasons to feel strongly about it.
Here are some past explanations I've made to other users in similar situations, in case any of it is helpful:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Thanks also Weneedlead for actually trying to argue your case in a relatively civil way after I and others attacked it, and I'm sorry if I raised the temperature. I think those of your arguments which I actually read are highly unconvincing (because toxins usually are functional analogues -- e.g. of calcium in the case of lead), but I freely admit that I'm biased against giving them a fair hearing, because a priori I predict an extremely low chance of it providing me any benefit for my time spent. Doesn't mean I'm absolutely 100% certain you're wrong.
FWIW I flagged a comment because of the potential harm in spreading misinformation, not because it was uncivil, however in hindsight maybe in a forum like this where people have proper debates it's better to discuss than to moderate misinformation.
I can't. Being wrong means that people exterminate themselves. It isn't something meaningless that doesn't matter.
>Also, people don't choose their views—for the most part we're conditioned by our backgrounds.
Ironically, this appears to be another symptom, just like the intensification of their existing beliefs by contrary evidence. Which also makes them intensify their belief in ever increasing progress even as the majority turns into savages.
This is not how chemistry works. The body will use (catalyze) what you give it, but the more reactive substances are used quicker and in greater abundance.
Also who are these people that are critically malnourished? In the western world at least, we have access to all the vitamins and minerals we need just by way of the food we eat even on a relatively poor diet.
The body might absorb all kinds of shit that isn't healthy, including carbon monoxide and pure americium, just like a computer holds onto malware and a lake holds onto PFAS.
Even most scientifically proven essential nutrients are poison if you have more than the optimal amount.
That's literally what getting fat is, the body holding onto things that have no benefit because of some chemical pathway left over from when we didn't have refrigerators and might need to walk for 4 days without food.
Evolution didn't give people a very effective "stop absorbing calories" function so why would we expect a "stop absorbing lead" function to be much better?
People didn't make it but people moved it where it could be taken in, and processed it into more active compounds.
I read somewhere that Thomas Midgley Jr could be considered, in modern history, to be the organism with highest impactful on earth with his invention of Chlorofurocarbons and their impact on the ozone layers.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesi...
From a 1998 article (https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/d3706d00-3d97-495d-8b8c-.... ) it estimates between $0.01-$0.03/liter for lead removal. US gasoline prices in 1990-2000 were at around $1.20/gallon which works out to about $0.32/liter. Taking the middle value of $0.02/liter for lead removal that would be around 6%. Just as a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I think in reality in many places that cost delta at pump the is lower since the usage of ethanol as an octane enhancer shifts the cost to various agricultural subsidy programs.
That said, that was with numerous advancements over the preceding 60 years which most likely would never have happened if we hadn't developed engines capable of taking advantage of high-octane fuels.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1984/04/01/c...
"But, as DeMuth noted, the EPA study is concerned about total costs and benefits to society, not just to one group. The study makes no attempt to predict what would happen to prices at the pump. It points out instead that the cost of manufacturing 87-octane unleaded gasoline, according to market prices, is consistently less than 2 cents a gallon more than for making 89-octane leaded gasoline. Average pump prices are about 7 cents more, however."
I believe this is the EPA study: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=9100YK16.TXT (I clicked the "download as pdf" adobe acrobat icon on the right)
"The DOE model estimates that at current lead levels (1.10 gplg) the marginal manufacturing cost differential between unleaded and leaded regular grades of gasoline is less than two cents per gallon. Retail prices, however, diverge by an average of about seven cents per gallon (Weekly Petroleum Status Report, 1984, various issues)."
7 cents per gallon is right around that 2 cents per liter that you cite, naturally.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/om030621b has some points of comparison (as well as a lot more historical context of the research that led Midgley & co to leaded gasoline if you're interested).
For what it's worth, per Table 1, ethanol is not anywhere near as effective as tetraethyllead -- it has an effectiveness of 0.1 per mol, vs TEL having a value of 118. Even when normalizing by molar mass (since TEL is a much heavier compound), TEL is still ~100x more effective than ethanol.
"... iodine had a few slight drawbacks. It added over a dollar to the cost of a gallon of fuel and we were afraid that would be considered a trifle excessive by most motorists."
"Further studies with more dilute solutions showed that a one-fortieth of one percent solution of tetraethyllead was equivalent in knock inhibition to 1.3% aniline in kerosene."
"The first public sale of Ethyl gasoline (the name given it by Kettering) occurred on February 1, 1923 in Dayton, OH at 25 cents per gallon (regular gas cost 21 cents per gallon) (Figure 8) before large-scale production had started."
What? It's hard to make heads or tails of this comment. Are you saying that asocial psychopaths wouldn't exist if we'd kept lead in gasoline?
[edit] also realizing this is this account's first HN post... I probably shouldn't be responding
I'm saying that the majority is now psychopaths.
I'm still more inclined that the drop in IQ is an artifact, but even if intelligence is improved in some way, it's useless when the person is asocial.
Not my first post, not that it matters.
It’s also hard to tell what your point actually is. I’d advise re-thinking how you structure your thoughts or writing.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-invento...
> Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer with CFCs – but while these dire consequences were unintended… could they have been anticipated?
Biggest ever? more than nuclear weapons? A bit of a stretch to say ever. I think this is disputable.
Can you imagine? Most aviation would never have happened if this guy hadn't invented leaded gasoline.
Duh, of course it would. Aviation gasoline would have used other methods of increasing octane, and/or then we'd have made do with slightly lower octane avgas. And engines would have been designed accordingly.
The only reason why getting rid of leaded avgas has been a 40 year saga is that they have been chasing the dream of a 1:1 replacement that would require no changes to 100% of existing aircraft. Now it seems they finally have such a fuel in G100UL, we'll see if and how quickly usage of it expands to replace leaded avgas.
There's no inspection or modification of the aircraft. It's just a piece of paper. The FAA could fix the problem for those aircraft with the stroke of a pen.
That's a very stupid idea if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
Which you can use as a reply to like 90% of comments on this benighted site.
It does not work. Countries would still fight conventional wars, because not everything is worth escalating. Even in your example. They are being invaded and are at risk of losing their country (well, they were at some point anyway). Do you reckon they’d throw a nuke at the US and so be absolutely certain to lose everything they have rather than fight a conventional war and having a chance at taking their country back?
On the other hand, proliferation has real risks in terms of radionuclides ending up in things like terrorist groups.
Overall, it makes as much sense as the “if teachers had guns schools would be safer” talking points.
Same applies to most current conflicts.
And about non traditional fights, maybe there would be less of those as big countries would be more careful about their actions.
Also I believe that if every school kid had a gun there would be lot less bullying. As they would be able to instantly produce credible self-defence when the society entirely fails to protect them. And they would be fully in moral right to answer with reasonable force to such actions.
Yes, and a lot more shootings. IMO the same applies to nukes. If every country had nukes then they'd be less conventional warfare, but a lot more nuclear bombings. It only takes one person to decide it's a good idea.
That’s a very interesting question! So much of the US foreign policy is predicated on the fact that there will never, ever be a war on American soil. It would definitely change the risk dessinent and the political acceptability of aggressive foreign policy.
Even though the effect of leaded gasoline is small on any specific individual on average, the cumulated effect over ~a century is staggering.
... so far.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/public-awareness-of-nucl...
Anything I could write seems so obvious. I can't think. I think I need a break from HN for a while. You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.
Indeed, it is. There is nothing more depressing than what we are doing to ourselves and to our own world.
> I've read some HN comments before which for some reason suggest a large-scale nuclear "war" wouldn't be so bad
No mistake, it would be absolutely terrible, country- if not civilisation-ending. None of this is any good. It is just that nuclear weapons and our current way of life are on two opposite sides of a risk spectrum: nuclear apocalypse is a very improbable event with huge consequences; our industry is a fact of life that has been more or less silently killing indiscriminately, almost innocent because we don’t see its effects as huge, memorable events. A nuclear winter might kill hundreds of millions if it happens; we’ve already killed much more than that with non-nuclear means.
So yeah, nuclear weapons are terrible, and I completely disagree with the other poster who said everyone should have them. I just wish we would see the harm we do every day as clearly as the harm we could do in exceptional circumstances.
> You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.
I think the post has been downvoted. I don’t have all the detail but I think the score has fluctuated a bit. If it can be of comfort to you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
"by his death, his business had established more than 90 armaments factories, despite his apparently pacifist character."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel
How ‘merchant of death’ Alfred Nobel became a champion of peace https://www.thelocal.se/20101004/29406/
And if you live near an airport you are probably affected by elevated lead levels.
https://news.sccgov.org/news-release/study-commissioned-coun...
FAA refuses to act here. Regulations are written in blood. And no one is bleeding yet.
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/1/pgac285/69797...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AEAT-05-...
https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c74f2...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
Avgas is unnecessarily putting more lead into the air. Any amount of lead in the air is bad.
Also, it is true that neighborhoods near the airport not in the flight path also have higher lead levels than average, but I'm not sure how that helps the case - there is elevated lead levels near airports, which can adversely affect your health.
While leaded avgas is not great the FAA just approved a replacement and I'm sure it will be in use quickly because "hurr durr muh lead" is the rallying cry of obnoxious suburbanites who just bought a house beside an airport and now want it shut down and everyone involved in general aviation has a large incentive to silence that screeching.
Now, before any jerks show up to strawman me as endorsing lead exposure so they can bust out their favorite "no safe level" quip that they love to circle jerk it to, I'm not. I'm saying that while the effect is measurable it's not meaningful in light of the fact that you or anyone else's lead exposure is overwhelmingly dominated by local sources.
Heavy metals in general never stay in the blood very long, the body binds them as quickly as it can, and the only way to accurately test involves taking a chelator first (to cause it to release into the blood stream) and then testing for acute poisoning (by causing it). There may be newer methods that have been developed since, but as of 2008 that was true.
Anyone who has suffered mercury or lead poisoning that was diagnosed by a medical professional would be aware of this, which is why there is no safe level, it bioaccumulates, and is a time-bomb for acute poisoning if it ever gets released.
Incidentally cilantro is a powerful chelator, and is used in food. Many people who have suffered poisoning get powerful headaches and other poisoning symptoms which can mimic many symptoms on the ADD/Autism/ADHD spectrum when eating this food, and often themselves don't know why.
The new replacement fuels are good, but they have one general large drawback. They require a recertification of the engine/frame of the plane. According to the lobby group AOPA, it will cost the industry in excess of $150 billion annually in the US alone.
In response, EPA issued an statement that there will be no phase-out date for planes to meet the new minimum standard, saying that it is the FAA responsibility to issue a process so that airplanes fulfills the new minimum standard. The FAA in turn said that regulating lead in avgas is an EPA responsibility, and they will not issue a phase-out date for planes to meet the new minimum standard.
That has been the last word from both agencies since 2010.
Also (at least in the UK), UL91 (the unleaded-alternative for some aeroplanes) is more expensive than 100LL. E.g. looking at a nearby (GA) airport, the price for 100LL is £2.22/litre and UL91 is £2.60. You can sometimes use Mogas (literally automotive unleaded) but this has some temperature restrictions due to the vapour point.
https://simpleflying.com/aircraft-fuel-dumping/
You can never know if that comment will be at the top, or showdead-only at the very bottom. That’s what makes it so exciting to open the comments.
He was horrible... but the fact anyone actually listened to him is what really creeps me out.
One evil man I can understand, you ignore him or put him in jail if he does a crime, it doesn't keep people up at night the same way, although it's disgusting.
That same tendency just kind of lurking dormant in millions, means even democracy might not stop it.
eg:
> Nobody explained why the hole was in Antarctica despite almost all the CFC being produced and used in the northern hemisphere.
There is both an Artic and Antartic ozone hole, as gases eventually circulate globally both poles receive nearly the same volume of (man made) precursor chemicals .. however the Antartic is typically colder in spring and the ozone destroying reaction is tempreture sensitive.
Amazing, you can't even get monopoly right
Both were invented in the service of DuPont. CFC at least helped making refrigeration safer and helped getting it to the masses. Leaded gasoline on the other hand was always known as a bad idea.
In both cases though, DuPont fought back hard to prevent bans of these solutions. They rather kill the planet than their profits.
Suitably enough he killed himself with another one of his inventions that used pulleys to overcome mobility issues due to his Polio infection and helped him get out of bed. I guess health and safety was really not his thing.
[0] https://timharford.com/2022/11/cautionary-tales-the-inventor...
http://acshist.scs.illinois.edu/bulletin_open_access/v31-2/v...
I just meant to say that his solution to his mobility problems came with significant tech debt that came to hang him later.
That right here is the point. With commercial units, you can be relatively sure only trained professionals will touch it, it will be somewhat decently maintained, and installation will be done with decent quality. With anything consumer-retail? As a manufacturer, you'll have to include absolutely ridiculously dumb people into your risk estimation, and you don't want to risk headlines like "Exploding brand XYZ AC unit kills family in house fire" because the father who had installed it caused a leak in the propane circuit - people won't care about that distinction, they'll see your brand as tarnished and unsafe.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bilott#Initial_actions_...
Corporations are malignant paperclip maximizers. We are already in an "AI apocalypse". How many people did leaded fuel kill? Lead exposure makes people stupid and violent - how many wars did it indirectly contribute to, how far back has society been held? That's one corporation. One!!
"Corporations bad" is a sort of tired left wing trope at this point but I think that's because the scale of the problem is difficult to wrap one's head around - it's hard to imagine an alternate world. But we didn't choose to inhabit a world run by corporations, it just happened through a process of blind natural selection, and it will kill us all unless we do something about it now. Our current governments are clearly inadequate - we need to be consciously, deliberately, constructing alternate ways of organizing ourselves, as rapidly as possible, to combat the threat of this new lifeform. And make no mistake, it is combat - they will fight back! They will fight back on a level so subtle and insidious that you will be convinced that there is no fight, or that you are powerless, or that the anti-corporate movement is on the wrong side.
What can you do about it? You're an HN reader, you can probably make websites. Build something designed to facilitate collective action. Bring out the best in people. Make it so that when we all know that something is bad, no fucking corporation can pay off the government to be allowed to do it anyway.
https://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/62787551366/stories
[0] (although that varies by country and having a government is almost invariably better than not having one)
The idea is that exposure to lead causes people to have problems that lead to violent behavior later in life. The evidence presented includes the correlation observed between the removal of lead from gasoline and a sharp fall in crime rates 20 years later.
1. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
I reckon the Bitcoin guy is in second place. Proof of work was a terrible idea.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/10/when-we-cease-...