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Leaded Gas, CFCs, and the Dark Side of Progress (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Leaded Gas did a great job of keeping engines from knocking thanks to tetra-ethyl lead. Unfortunately the fumes from the chemical are highly poisonous. R-12 is a refrigerant that revolutionized the cold storage of vaccines. It turned out to be the first of the chlorofluorocarbons which are well known (and now banned) for damaging the environment. Both are the creations of one inventor: Thomas Migley, Jr. Two deadly inventions seem like more than enough for one person, but his story ends with a third. Stricken with Polio, he invented a system to help him get in and out of bed on his own. A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
If you had it to do all over again, you'd probably STILL use leaded gasoline until about 1955 or so.
No, no, I wouldn't. There was a conference in 1925 about how dangerous it was. They came to the wrong conclusion.
If I recall correctly, the signs of lead being dangerous were there, but like the cigarette industry decades later, the companies invested in leaded gasoline fought tooth and nail to keep everyone believing lead was harmless. They would actively try to discredit and defund anyone who said otherwise and put all their political weight towards squashing any legislation that might question their official platform.
Obviously, they weren't ultimately successful is keeping "lead is dangerous" suppressed forever, but they did delay any action to mitigate the effects (and profited off said delay).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Wow! That's amazing because I see the same evidence used to justify not vaccinating kids...
Correlation does NOT imply causation. I.e. Just because something changed, doesn't mean it caused something else to happen...
This article sparked the memory of wondering why we had to pay more for unleaded gas... Apparently it was expensive to remove the naturally occurring lead from the refined gasoline.
because instead of lead, they had to add other chemicals to raise octane ratings to reduce knocking. Those chemicals cost more.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
uhh, bullshit, the anti-knock agents are needed to get a reasonable efficiency out of the engine. See, engine efficiency is strongly affected by compression ratio, and the higher the compression ratio, the more likely the engine is to knock. Hence, high-performance car engines (not your sedan or pickup) need higher octane fuels. These, of course, have crap in them to retard the speed of the flame front, and at the time, TEL was the only commercially viable product. so then we got MTBE, which we also found out was pretty toxic. Now we've got amazingly high performance polymers that survive ethanol, though I just replaced a gas tank in a 20 year old car because the ethanol brought water in that corroded it. Ethanol will eventually be replaced when realize that burning food is a dumb idea, but I have no idea what will come next. However, all of these agents have been much better for the atmosphere then would have been not using them and pumping 20-30% more CO2 into the atmosphere.
You recall correctly.
The scientist who first noticed that lead from car pollution was actually contaminating the environment was smeared by car and gas companies. I think Cosmos has an episode about it.
> Can someone point to the anything in the environment today that still shows signs of damage from leaded gasoline?
Depends- possibly people. There's a few competing theories as to why violent crime fell so sharply, and one of them has to do with the sudden lack of lead exposure, especially in places with high traffic and reasonably low ventilation- cities.
Getting rid of leaded gasoline was a very needed and necessary thing- or rather, cutting it back dramatically was.
When cars went from relatively uncommon to extremely common, increasing by an order of magnitude, at the same time that miles driven per person year went way up, the lead went from some kind of rounding error to a problem of moderate seriousness, and it probably still has some effects today. If it had been shitcanned in the 50s, that would probably have been averted, and by then engine tech had had enough time to progress too. But once it was enshrined in practice it took a long time to weed out, as the other comments have pointed out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#History_of_controversy_and_phase-out
There are numerous citations in the first paragraph that you can follow and browse at your leisure.
Cosmos did have almost an entire episode (or a big part of it) devoted to this. This guy was doing research on determining the age of rocks and ran into problems when he wanted to created a lead-free lab environment. One thing led to another and he figured out lead was everywhere because of the leaded gas. From there, he realized this thing was making us sick and fought a long hard fight to bring this to the public. His R&D was directly or indirectly funded by the oil industry which promptly pulled his funding. He was a poster child for following the data and designing great tests to make the data drive conclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson#Campaign_against_lead_poisoning
Wrong. They use 100LL, for "low lead", which isn't really low at all. All standard small-engine aircraft use this fuel, unless it's some "experimental" aircraft with a Subaru automotive engine or something.
So I am an environmental consultant who deals with contamination like this. I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but like many things, it's complicated. Here are a few other facts that should be in the discussion about MTBE:
1) The reason MTBE was mandated by the federal gov't (not just CA) was that it did significantly reduce tailpipe emissions, which had a real benefit to human health and air quality. (Now ethanol has replaced MTBE to serve the same function, again by federal mandate)
2) Risks associated with groundwater contamination were not as well understood then as they are now, so we can only place blame on MTBE and the regulators who mandated it with the benefit of hindsight.*
3) MTBE got lots of press, but there are other compounds in gasoline with much higher toxicity and are more persistent in soils and groundwater (benzene, ethylbenzene, naphthalene, and tri-methylbenzenes to give a few examples).
4) The vast majority of MTBE [and gasoline contamination in general] was from leaky, old, poorly constructed/maintained underground tank systems that prior to the mid-90's had little to no regulations or industry standards. By the end of the 90's essentially all registered underground storage tanks across the country were replaced or upgraded to comply with new federal standards to make them much more reliable (like double-walled tanks, leak detection systems, corrosion resistance, maintenance standards, electronic monitoring, and more). The federal mandate to replace MTBE with ethanol came about a decade after the country had upgraded the tank systems, so the actual of risk MTBE contamination to groundwater at that time was very low; most contamination of MTBE had happened many years prior.
5) Since the federal mandate to replace MTBE with ethanol the number of nationwide reported leaks from tank systems has spiked because ethanol, unlike MTBE, is very corrosive and degrades tank systems faster, which goes back to point #3 that there are worse compounds in gasoline to worry about. The silver-lining is the new tanks systems are much better at quickly identifying when a leak occurs, significantly reducing the volume of gasoline leaked before it is corrected.
*- Keep in mind the EPA didn't even exist until 1970 and politicians/laws typically lag 5-10 years behind the science. So, it wasn't until around 1990 that our understanding of contamination and environmental regulations started to have any significant impact on how businesses/polluters operated. Relative to many other STEM fields, environmental science is very young and the changes in our understanding of contamination, risk, and regulations over the past couple decades cannot be understated.