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Comment by pomian | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of issues with the leaded replacement gasolines. Lead was at least heavy, and "fell" close to it's point of use. The BTEX components added to gasoline after removing the lead, are carcinogenic. They are also volatile. They go everywhere, and affect everyone. Overall, neither the biological or human ecology are better off. The politics behind the leaded gasoline change is fascinating, as most of the other environmental decisions are, when studied from the point of view of toxicology and environmental science.

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Lead accumulates in the body poisons you for far longer than the other chemicals you mention.

Even with relative to the particular effects on health, you really can't compare lead and those others. Lead was really the worse.

DNA damage bioaccumulates too...

But with lead you have both neurological/etc damages and DNA damages! These lead derivatives are classified as probably carcinogenous!

So, you see? The comparison ends up easy!

My old roommate, a NASA chemist (Max Bernstein, Ph.D.) once said to me, "I don't worry so much about chemicals; they break down. I worry about heavy metals because they never break down."

Wrt health effects of gasoline, it is bad for you full stop.

The chemistry should be improved or changed if needed, however leaded (pb) fuel should never return. We are definitely better off.

I wonder if other heavy metals can also make a higher octane fuel.

How about tetraethil uranium? That sounds like a very high-energy fuel. ;-)

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/57417459

I wonder, hoping it doesn’t, if it works as a fuel additive. Someone must have thought of that in the 50’s and 60’s.

Where can I read more about this?

Yes this seems like a very interesting, important and overlooked issue.

I also think the fellow stating that we are not better off for having unleaded fuel is overstating the matter. Lead in fuel was quite strongly correlated with crime rates, no?

Yeah, but also general societal changes.

Correlation is not causation.

Sure, but lead has multiple known mechanisms which would indeed cause individuals to be more likely to commit crime, and serious efforts to get lead out of fuel correlated pretty strongly with a maxima in crime rates that had been steadily increasing for decades. [0]

While it is clear to me that there were other legislative and possibly environmental changes that also contributed to this drop, I think that applying 'correlation is not causation' here while applying no scrutiny to the argument that "removing lead from fuel didn't do shit" is pretty facile.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

That is complicated. The USA EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is an amazing source of information. The problem is, there is so much information, it is hard to learn anything simply. (I just tried a simple search, and it is overwhelming.) Of the four ingredients in BTEX, it may be easiest to start with Benzene. It is the 'heaviest', safest and perhaps simpler. (But do try to search for BTEX and EPA online, and you'll get to many interesting sites. Contaminated water, air, food, etc.) To simplify; Here is an example: https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/ToxProfiles/ToxProfiles.aspx?id=40&... I advise you to study without too much concern. As with a medical journal, if one starts reading about all the things that are bad for you, and surround you everywhere, it can be alarming. It is a fascinating field. Soil, water, and air chemistry are complex and interdependent systems, and when you throw in human, animal and plant toxicology, it is even more confounding. Unfortunately, the simplifications required for political battles, invested industrial lobbying, result in poor science.

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