Disclosure: I work for GM, anything I write here is solely my own opinion. First off: I appreciate the article. I think modern safety culture has vastly improv

Disclosure: I work for GM, anything I write here is solely my own opinion. First off: I appreciate the article. I think modern safety culture has vastly improved quality of life. I think we need to be very aware of harms that accrue at industrial scale. I think we only get good results when people are intentional about understanding and dealing with negative externalities. I think safety and security require leadership. We need to guard against motivated reasoning. All that being said, this article is very much written from the present perspective. I am NOT arguing that ethyl lead is or was ever good or acceptable, or that GM or oil companies should have ever fought to allow it. The author talks about an industrial incident where a significant number of workers were poisoned. It is important to acknowledge the harm here, but it should also be viewed in an industrial context. There are risks in industrial and lab activities, even today. Chemical and pharmaceutical processes have precursors and reagents that the public is never exposed to in anything like the amount present in the lab. For instance, the amount of thimerosal is injectable medicines is miniscule to an individual patient, but in the lab or industry context it is absolutely a risk. We now know that the exposure to the public of lead from gasoline was never at an acceptable level, but the author uses an industrial incident, not public exposure for their example. --- The other thing that is difficult for modern readers to understand is how ignorant the general public was about risk at scale. Bear in mind that people who work and manage industry come from the general public, so while they may have more knowledge, it takes a while to understand facts and then translate that to changing motivations. For instance: If I run an artisanal lead smelter or mercury still in my backyard, I would adding some amount of lead or mercury to the environment around me. I would be causing some disease to people; but it would be limited to a small area. As those operations scale up, the harms would spread exponentially. For another example, compare wood fire emissions to diesel emissions. This seems really really obvious, so one wonders why anyone would participate; and it's easy to blame the profit motive and evil corporations. I also see a simple bias towards doing work. I have some job to do, so I do that job. As I do that job, I am creating risks and possibly causing harm. My drive is to get the job done, and I only have so many resources for assessing harm. ---