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Forcing unleaded gas on the American people was so woke.
Not enough people are aware that the compound added to gasoline, tetraethyl lead (TEL), was understood to be potently toxic before it was used as a gasoline additive. Effective alternatives to TEL existed, but TEL had the advantage that its use could be patented. It could make some very rich companies even richer.
Short article from Smithsonian Magazine, 2016: Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented
…in February 1923, a filling station sold the first tank of leaded gasoline. [TEL developer] Midgley wasn’t there: he was in bed with severe lead poisoning, writes History.com. The next year, there was serious backlash against leaded gasoline after five workers died from TEL exposure at the Standard Oil Refinery in New Jersey, writes Deborah Blum for Wired, but still, the gasoline went into general sale later that decade.
Long, long article from The Nation, 2000, by way of archive.org: The Secret History of Lead
In March 1922, Pierre du Pont wrote to his brother Irénée du Pont, Du Pont company chairman, that TEL is “a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately.” This statement of early factual knowledge of TEL’s supreme deadliness is noteworthy, for it is knowledge that will be denied repeatedly by the principals in coming years as well as in the Ethyl Corporation’s authorized history, released almost sixty years later. Underscoring the deep and implicit coziness between GM and Du Pont at this time, Pierre informed Irénée about TEL before GM had even filed its patent application for it.
A concise history in timeline format: The Rise and Fall of Leaded Gasoline: An Absurd and True Timeline
1923: GM partners with Standard Oil (now Exxon) and DuPont to form Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. They market the product as “Ethyl,” deliberately avoiding the word “lead” despite known toxicity.
What the hell is wrong with Du Pont. Horrible track record
They forgot airplanes tho
Next week the US fascists will celebrate putting lead back into gas
They actually can’t if they wanted to. It would very quickly destroy modern fuel injection systems and completely clog catalytic converters. They’d almost instantly cripple most of the US by-
Wait, fuck. I gotta stop typing or else they’ll think this is a good idea!!!
I mean… destroying cars means you buy more cars. CAPITALISM.
Or it means less pollution if you also crash the economy so no one can afford more cars.
Sadly, I don’t think that’s how it works.
I’m interested in hearing your logic behind this.
If all of the modern engines are bricked and people can’t afford to buy new cars, then there will be less cars generating pollution.
They’ll just keep rebuilding engines. They’ll use old cars. It’s not going to end cars. People are too dependent on cars. The earth (as we know it) is dead. Nothing will stop it.
On the up side, once humanity is wiped out of existence, the earth will eventually bounce back.
We crushed all the non collectable old cars after the 2007 cash for clunkers scam.
Don’t tell the GOP, they’ll insist on extra-leaded gas for all of us.
Of course it worked, where did they think the lead was coming from?
They knew where it was coming from, they just wanted MORE MONEY from cheap additives to the already catastrophically destructive oil profits.
Stripping regulations like these is a core tenet of fascism. I mean republicans. Like, Reagan-deep.
The additives at the time didn’t work well; and simply removing the lead would lead to premature detonation, destroying engines. It wasn’t until the health effects were proven to be a big issue there was enough demand to change engine designs to be compatible with unleaded gas. That pressure was required as operating an additional set of incompatible fuel and engine types isn’t easy.
We still haven’t completely removed leaded gas from daily use. Namely small aircraft still use it for the same reasons cars used to use it.
Biodeisel was around, but it wasn’t sexy. Wouldn’t sell.
We do that with gasoline in the US. 10% of gas is corn ethanol.
It’s “up to 10%”. Who knows what the actual number is.
It’s 10%.
The Renewable Fuel Standard, createdy by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates an increasing quantity of ethanol be produced and mixed into gasoline. That is now at 36 billion gallons of ethanol as of 2022.
However, it is capped at 10% to ensure engines can safely use it. So, with the US annual consumption of gasoline at 137 billion gallons, we hit the 10% cap and put 13 billion gallons of ethanol into gasoline.
Who knows what the actual number is.
It’s 10%.
The very first paragraph in your last link straight up says the actual amount varies.
From hair!
Lead-headed boomers and gen-x’ers still fucking it up for the rest of us.
This just in: Banning something reduces the volume of it.
The war on drugs would like a word with you.
Shows about hair are now banning lead?
Like, what kind of shows? Hairstyling shows?
What a strangely phrased title.
WTH? Why were you downvoted for that? The Web is such a strange place. Like you, I didn’t understand the title.
Re-phrasing it:
“Leaded fuel bans successful based on hair analyses”
Straightforward, albeit somehow clunky.
“HTMA shows success in leaded fuel bans”
That does leave an acronym to be deciphered, so maybe not the best.
“Hair records leaded fuel ban effectiveness”
Almost as pithy, and creatively accurate. Because hair does act as something of a record of what happened to the body.
I think the entire speed bump of the original could have been removed by replacing “shows” with “demonstrates”. A longer word, yes, so less ideal in our brevity-obsessed media, but one that dramatically prunes away other possible misinterpretations. And replacing “lead in fuel” with “leaded fuel” would have definitely reduced clunkiness as well.
Ah, thanks. Nice clarification.
good ole GOP, “Let’s lead with lead!”
