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Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
- aa_is_op 3mo agoThe guy that invented spent years bed-ridden because of it... yet he still went to trade shows to show it off
- afzalive 3mo agoAnd he also invented CFCs
- chistev 3mo agoHe was bedridden because of Polio. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872443
- m4d 3mo agoAnytime Thomas Midgley Jr. pops up, I take the opportunity to re-listen to his episode on the Memory Palace. Wonderful bit of historical biography: https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/ https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/
- throw1234567891 3mo ago“What don’t kill you makes you more strong”.
- none2585 3mo agoGenuinely trying to help - one would generally phrase this as "... makes you stronger".
- throw1234567891 3mo agoIt’s a direct quote. But you mean well.
- none2585 3mo agoWell damn I'm sorry now I'm curious - a direct quote from what?
- throw1234567891 3mo agoFrom a song, spelling is different but it does end with “makes you more strong”. Looks for broken, beaten, scared.
- snypher 3mo agoNietzsche wrote 'was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärk', don't worry about what that other robot is posting.
- throw1234567891 3mo agoYou being the other other robot?
- cyanydeez 3mo agoi'm fairly certain the reason trump was elected is the long tail of leaded gasoline; the timing fits pretty well.
- Epa095 3mo agoWhy did these same people vote differently earlier? Does the effect of leaded gasoline show up later in life? And does not explain all the young men voting for him.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoThey didn’t vote differently. There were a larger number of the greatest generation that were more comfortable with shared sacrifice in service of society and less entitled like the baby boomers are.
- vlian2088 3mo agonow let's dig up some old timey polls and see how the greatest generation felt about the issues you hold dear :)
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoRead charitably, OP isn’t decrying a disagreement on issues as much as the willingness to burn everything down just to see someone else hurt more than oneself. This is present on the left. But it’s uniquely politically actualised by MAGA. (The Democratic Socialists winning elections aren’t seeking to overturn elections or violently storm governing bodies.)
- s1artibartfast 3mo agoThe greatest generation has been <5% of population since like 05'. baby boomers were 30+% and probably higher for voters.
- hyperhello 3mo agoYes, the psychological effects of environmental lead last a lifetime. No, they didn’t vote differently, they have always gravitated to actors that promise simple solutions and highlight bad blood and animus.
- ck2 3mo agoand still sprayed all around the surrounding land at almost every airport in the USA and worldwide from prop aircraft exhaust despite knowing ANY amount is toxic and irreversible for 30+ years * https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-was-phased-out-25-years-ago-why-are-n1264970 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
- londons_explore 3mo agoYou say that in the past tense... But pretty much every propeller plane worldwide still uses the stuff...
- mr_toad 3mo agoOnly in piston engines, which are a minority of propeller planes. Most commercial propeller aircraft are turboprops, and they use jet fuel. And diesel engines are slowly taking over from gasoline in piston engines.
- mh- 3mo agoCorrect. For others reading this though: virtually all piston-engine GA aircraft in the US today are still burning 100LL (leaded), and there are nearly 200,000 of them actively flying. There is a timeline to transition to UL, but very low collective confidence it'll happen by the 2030 goal. edit: to the commenter that fired off the reactionary reply and deleted it before I could help you. No, not because "[rich people] won't do the right thing." It's because lead is an anti-knock additive for piston engines, and a safe replacement has to go through unimaginable amounts of testing. Once it's certified, one must still figure out scaling production, distribution, etc. Aviation is a very slow moving industry and regulatory environment, which I'm personally thankful for. PDF (77pgs): https://download.aopa.org/advocacy/2026/2026-01_Draft-Unleaded-Avgas-Transition-Plan.pdf https://download.aopa.org/advocacy/2026/2026-01_Draft-Unlead...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- phendrenad2 3mo agoSame with cigarettes and asbestos. Everyone knew smokers had shorter lives, but the facts were suppressed because it was inconvenient. Everyone knew asbestos was dangerous, but they put it in every single house for decades because "fire was worse". And don't even get me started on DDT and teflon.
- hyperhello 3mo agoCigarette smoking really got going in the world wars, I understand, especially ww2 when the world had manufacturers serving the effort. The custom is dying with the veterans as everyone knows they have a hall pass for it but the rest of us don’t. So smoking was a shorter life but that hardly matters when you’re deployed in theater.
- gilrain 3mo ago> The custom is dying with the veterans You might want to update your knowledge.
- hyperhello 3mo agoAs of 2024, the cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults is 9.9%, which is an all-time low.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jghn 3mo agoAsbestos gets a bit of a bad rap. There's an enormous difference from e.g. asbestos tiles and siding in a house vs loose clumps of insulation at mass scale in large factories and such. But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.
- edelbitter 3mo ago
- louky 3mo agoThe major proponent was also known as Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0] Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1] [0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
- mmooss 3mo ago> Accidentally Based on the OP, it wasn't at all accidental. They knew it was dangerous and chose it because they could make more money than with safer alternatives such as ethanol.
- cyberax 3mo agoI don't think he really appreciated the danger of lead. Its acute toxicity was well-known, but not its chronic toxicity. And plenty of stuff is toxic in large quantities but harmless (or even vital!) in small quantities.
- mmooss 3mo agoInteresting - what is that based on? He's not some incidental commentator. He's an engineer and a principle force behind this technology. He is responsible for the outcomes - 'I didn't know' is reckless negligence. And if there were clear acute problems, chronic problems weren't hard to guess at for anyone, much less an engineer, with all those resources, working on it for years.
- sysguest 3mo ago> engineer and a principle force behind this technology well he's not some biochemist... and even biochemists have trouble within their own field because there's so much 'unknown' stuff in biochem (eg Thalidomide scandal)
- whatisthiseven 3mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoSome previous discussion: 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508
- culi 3mo agoYes and the toxic effects of asbestos had been known for thousands of years before popcorn ceilings became a fad
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dbg31415 3mo agoThe Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA > This, my dear friend, is all I can at present recollect on the Subject. You will see by it, that the Opinion of this mischievous Effect from Lead, is at least above Sixty Years old; and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv'd and practis'd on. > Benjamin Franklin, 1786
- tim-tday 3mo agoElon might take the lead with his destruction of US aid. I heard an estimate that millions of unnecessary deaths may come of it.
- HumanEater 3mo agoWhy is this surfacing up?
- phoronixrly 3mo ago[flagged]
- weard_beard 3mo agohmm good question.
- meristohm 3mo agoFor an animated version of this story, see Cosmos, season 2 (I forget which episode, but it was helpful in teaching about this in high school)
- fhdkweig 3mo agohttps://www.space.com/25579-cosmos-recap-earth-age-lead-poisoning.html https://www.space.com/25579-cosmos-recap-earth-age-lead-pois... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room
- p0w3n3d 3mo agoAh. We can't patent XYZ let's use ABC. Such sociopathic thinking.
- dnemmers 3mo agoA good Veritasium video on the subject: https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?is=MorITIg_MvFrKtvR https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?is=MorITIg_MvFrKtvR
- leoc 3mo agoLucas Reilly's Mental Floss article on Clair Patterson https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... is a much better piece. I'll also recycle https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo 's old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 on this article from its 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 (again, what follows is his or her work not mine!): > Two beliefs became entrenched: 1. that lead is natural to the human body, and 2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1] A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century. So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use. Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_against_lead_poisoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again... [2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...
- aidenn0 3mo ago[dead]
- Fricken 3mo agoWe've known about climate change for more than a century, but we're pigs, we don't care.
- tim-tday 3mo agoI think it’s important not to use the “we” word here. 1) Many people know and care. 2) some people lie for profit 3) other people are willfully ignorant and allow the liars keep at it because it’s more convenient. And even among those who know and care there’s different amounts people are willing to do about it. I imagine you (who theoretically know and care) still drive, fly, use plastic, Eat foods grown with petroleum based fertilizers, buy products shipped long distances with petroleum. (As do I) The key is to go after the liars so we can set sane policies based on findings of fact pursued in good faith.
- anonymars 3mo agoI think this is a good summary for politics generally
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- none2585 3mo ago"We" live in a democracy and our leaders are chosen by "us". You don't get to pick and choose. You are your government assuming you're from any western democracy. The planet is becoming inhospitable for humans and honestly likely for the best. At least some folks will get rich out of it.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo ago25 years ago in the UK, leaded petrol was being phased out but still pretty common. The UK Government was giving people grants to have existing cars converted to run on LPG, so they'd only run on a coke can of petrol for a minute or so on startup then switch over to gas. Catalytic converters? Don't need 'em! There's no CO or unburnt fuel in the exhaust to catalyse because they run as lean as a vegan's dog! CO2 emissions? Sure, but the stuff is getting flared off as waste at refineries anyway, and we're not going to stop making plastics and fertilisers any time soon, so may as well extract useful work from burning it! We could have had incredibly clean cities everywhere by now, by simply keeping older cars on the road and adapting them to run on much cleaner safer fuel. But there was a problem, an absolute bombshell of a problem. The fatal flaw that killed LPG as a road fuel. It didn't sell new cars. It didn't sell anyone any debt. So they came up with "scrappage schemes" where you'd get a couple of hundred quid for your old car, it would get destroyed, and then all you had to do was buy a nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel car instead, at some swingeing rate of interest (expect to pay well over twice the sticker price by the end of it - and no, you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package). And you see how well that worked out.
- bluGill 3mo agoLPG had the same problem as electric cars. In the early years there was no infrastructure and so if you buy one you're an early adopter and you can't actually go anywhere. It took a while to get that infrastructure and now electric cars are useful for most trips. You can use LPG cars to go for most trips in the US even today. However, you better plan ahead because finding a place of fuel is going to require some effort. I had a few LNG stations near me, but they seem to have all been torn out, meaning that never made it. Gas cars faced the same thing when they first came out but by the time they became used for longer trips there was gas everywhere and in the meantime there was gas at least where you bought the car and so it was good enough for the short trips that bought it for.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo agoThat was kind of it. Until maybe five years ago, every branch of Morrison's had two LPG pumps at their petrol stations, as did Asda. Now it's mostly wholesale fuel suppliers that have pumps.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> countries where leaded gasoline was—or still is—used Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1]. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-now-banned-the-use-of-leaded-gasoline-in-cars https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021
- gilrain 3mo ago…but is exhausting at volume from most small aircraft you see. I say sadly, as an aviation geek; we can do better!
- aftbit 3mo agoWe're working on it, slowly but surely. This has been a known problem for a long time, at least since 2009 if not earlier. GAMI's G100UL was approved as a 100LL replacement in 2022, but there is still some controversy. Avweb has done a good series of videos on this. There were some real engineering concerns and some typical aviation conservative decision making. But really, it's a tragedy of the FAA fumbling the ball for decades at this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F-WngVMJBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F-WngVMJBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvse4Xhzwuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvse4Xhzwuk https://avweb.com/features/unleaded-avgas-airport-playbook-lands/ https://avweb.com/features/unleaded-avgas-airport-playbook-l... https://avweb.com/aviation-news/judge-denies-g100ul-motion/ https://avweb.com/aviation-news/judge-denies-g100ul-motion/ https://g100ul.com/ https://g100ul.com/
- Onavo 3mo agoA better way would be to switch to mogas and authorize cheap fuel system retrofits and maybe mandate dual FADECs on engines similar to the ADS B requirements. Your modern general aviation pistons can easily handle mogas. An even better way would been to encourage the migration to turbines and deprecate pistons entirely. Jet A (diesel) for the win. The new turbotechs regenerative turbines are a lot more reliable (3000 hours TBO). https://cubcrafters.com/c/2026/07/press-release-cubcrafters-introduces-the-new-carbon-cub-ult/ https://cubcrafters.com/c/2026/07/press-release-cubcrafters-... Pistons suffer from too many reliability issues (especially if you don't have a MX team on call like a commerical operation). I am not sure why the aviation industry (and the FAA in particular) is obsessed with keeping around almost-a-century old lawnmower engines (Yes your Cessna Skyhawks, if you trace them back to their predecessor, are from the WWII days). Learning to "lean an engine" never made me a better pilot and there's a reason FADECs are used everywhere else. It's a very big problem because most of the big general aviation players (Cirrus, Diamond, Continental, a bunch of others) are snapped up by Chinese conglomerates (they don't have general aviation in Asia but they have a growing number of flight schools, not sure how that works) now and they are hardly known for their expertise in piston engines. People buy Chinese EVs, nobody buys Chinese ICE cars. Diamond owners had to ground their planes for over 2 years because Diamond couldn't figure out how to do a Mercedes OEM license-built piston head properly. The Chinese-built pistons kept cracking and required boroscope engine inspections every 50 hours (notoriously expensive and not covered by warranty, they only managed to solve the cracking problem recently). So much for supposed Chinese manufacturing prowness. Imagine buying a fancy Porsche car and only to be told that you have to keep it in the garage most of the year because the car company got bought out and the new owners don't know how to produce a proper piston. Owners would riot. Sadly general aviation operators are trained to take it up the ass like a good little pilot because the dinosaur FAA (for whom general aviation is their lowest priority, about the same importance as hot air balloons) mandated that the OEM's word is literal law and if it's grounded then too bad.
- FuckButtons 3mo agoThere are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.
- bigibas123 3mo agoI've heard arsenic also being one of the elements with similar issues
- jmorenoamor 3mo agoWhat does lead have to give those properties?
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoWill anyone be held accountable though?
- none2585 3mo agoBetteridge's law here
- tokai 3mo agoPeople like to point and laugh at the Romans at their use of lead in plumbing and wine. But they were never even close to being as stupid and callous as we managed to be the last 150 years. They are going to be shaking their head at us for thousands of year hopefully.
- hunmernop 3mo agoGas itself is poison. Just take a deep huff at the gas station. EVs are the only way to go. At least the pollution is localized, not down every inner city street with exhaust and other vapors.
- vorticalbox 3mo agoMaybe you can enlighten me. My question that once you mined the materials for the car + battery, shipped that somewhere to be built, then shipped that to be sold. Then you have the added waste battery once it not longer hold enough charge. Is it actually better for the environment? If we add all this extra pull on the grid we need to generate the power for that too.
- kevstev 3mo agoIs this a real question? ICE cars have a battery too.
- halJordan 3mo agoEvs have a main battery and a car battery so they ice and ev are equivalent in that respect.
- vorticalbox 3mo agoSure Is! I’m largely uninformed on the topic. Asking questions even stupid ones means you get to not be stupid after.
- realusername 3mo agoYeah it's actually better and it's not even close, provided that the cars make more than 50k km. Petrol engines have terrible efficiency and that's also what makes the petrol numbers so bad.
- halJordan 3mo agoIf "it's not even close" at 50k km, then surely the break even is much lower and you could've just said that?
- dang 3mo agoDiscussed at the time (of the article): Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 - Sept 2021 (399 comments)
- b-kf 3mo ago`Discussed at the time` and here I expected a link to a HN thread from the 1920s! But yes, `(of the article)`, guess my reaction was anticipated :)
- dang 3mo agoYep we've been around the block a few times with that pre-emptive trick: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20discussed%20at%20the%20time%20%22of%20the%20article%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- b-kf 3mo agoI vaguely remember amounts of lead exposure and IQ (as in lower) could be linked quite well and there was a map showing that for the US. Trying to find it I stumbled upon this https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119 -> "The average lead-linked loss in cognitive ability was 2.6 IQ points per person as of 2015." Quite insane to think about. Obviously that's more than merely leaded gasoline though. Regarding the map, not what I was looking for, but https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs43247-025-02735-x/MediaObjects/43247_2025_2735_Fig2_HTML.png?as=webp https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/... from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02735-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02735-x is interesting. Still an ongoing issue, interesting article, some insane metrics in that image though. Lower image is showing `relative IQ cost` for children 0-9 years of age as of 2019,... as in `estimated loss of earning due to less IQ`, boy oh boy, let that sink in: Starting with incomplete exposure data, estimating the resulting IQ loss, then translating that into lifetime earnings (projected somehow into the future economy)...
- casey2 3mo agoSwitzerland banned in in 1926, the Soviet Union in major cities in the 50s. Everyone knows lead is deadly, but so is going outside. Policy makers have to weight the risks of velocity now vs crashing later.