Leaded fuel reduced IQ of children born before 1990

This comment makes me think you don't actually understand the situation. The vast majority of aviation fuel used IS Jet-A, which does not contain lead.

Small piston engine general aviation aircraft are the only ones that use leaded gas, and most of those can not use anything else that exists currently.

I too have a pregnant wife and a young child, but I worry far, far more about residual lead paint exposure than I do about avgas. Both get tested regularly and show no detectable levels (<2ug/dL), so that makes me feel like the risk exposure is acceptable. Yes, your quote about "no known safe level" is true, but at undetectable levels I'm confident it's in the noise along with all other environmental factors we don't know about.

If you're worried about lead exposure, are you testing?

A measure like this may be reasonable.

But C/D totals the entire piston aircraft fleet-- $50B+ of capital equip, plus the whole infrastructure and industry around it-- for only a very moderate change in lead exposure. Best estimates I've seen is that this would lower the total population burden from lead by well under 5%.

Much more sane, IMO, to put in a progressively escalating tax on leaded aviation fuels that over time becomes steep. Then airplanes can gradually transition as overhauls become due, etc, as the pressure from operating costs mounts. Presumably those burning the most fuel would transition first, and an industry capable of retrofitting a few percent of the aircraft per year would spring up.

Or perhaps this is the benefit of having younger people in government. Because 50 year old like me thinks "massive progress made, don't waste time on diminishing returns" by comparing the current situation to the distant past. Whereas someone younger sees the threat differently.

Frankly, the propellor airplanes I do see are mostly military which will likely not be impacted by any regulations. I am also making the assumption only propellor airplanes could be using unleaded gas.

Just awful.

No Chemtrailer here, btw.

https://timharford.com/books/worldaddup/

The ultimate cautionary tale here is Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic, How to Lie With Statistics. Huff’s book is clever, insightful, and impish, and it may be the best-selling book about statistics ever written. It is also, from cover to cover, a warning that statistics are all about misinformation, and that one should no more believe in them than in stage magic. Huff ended up testifying at a Senate hearing that the evidence linking smoking and cancer was as spurious as the evidence linking storks and babies. His unpublished sequel, How to Lie With Smoking Statistics, was paid for by a tobacco-lobby group.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/the-conspi...

People are very well aware that the war over what is truth and real continues to be fought. And that it is not merely corporations engaged in it, as control over truth and perception is at the heart of power. "All warfare is based on deception."

https://suntzusaid.com/book/1/18/

As a hint, if one side has a long record of lies, and another a long record of honest relations and owning their errors --- the smart money takes counsel from the second. It's wise to assess one's own sources on this basis from time to time.

That's why my initial stance on COVID vaccines was to be skeptical of the industry claims. This lumped me in with a lot of quacks, and with a political (US) group with whom that I don't normally align much.

It's been a strange few years. At this point, I'm not sure I know how to strike a balance between healthy skepticism and paranoia. Regarding the vaccines, I'm fully vaccinated, as enough time has passed to get me to a place where I think the stats bear it out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#History

Yes, while total use of leaded fuel now makes up a tiny percentage, it is still measurably significant to the people who live in the flight path of a municipal airport.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/08/18/reid-hillview-a...

Ironically, "protecting commercial interests" is why the whole lead fuel catastrophe came to be.

The wealthy are in jets or turbo props which don't use leaded gas.

Then the super-rich can continue to fly, paying the nation for the economic and health effects they're causing, but regular hobbyists will have to ground their planes till unleaded avgas is available.

Should be easy-ish to enforce, because planes and flight plans are registered, and anyone paying no tax and flying a lot ought to be easy to catch.

Drop in replacement, no engine changes, no performance changes, no compatibility issues with storage tanks, pipelines, anything.

They are claiming it will even increase time between overhauls, prolong spark plug life, maybe even increase engine life and require less oil changes.

Seems more costly though. But if the above materializes it might offset the costs too.

That sounds like the holy grail - if more airframes are issued STCs

""I'm not taking any chance whatever," Midgley declared. "Nor would I... doing that every day."

"Midgley was - perhaps - being a little disingenuous. He had recently spent several months in Florida, recuperating from lead poisoning." (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40593353)

I believe after that press conference he spent several more months in Europe detoxing. High-concentration exposure was known to be dangerous ("On the Thursday of the week before Midgley's press conference, at a Standard Oil plant in New Jersey, a worker named Ernest Oelgert started hallucinating. By Friday, he was running around the laboratory, screaming in terror. On Saturday, with Oelgert dangerously unhinged, his sister called the police. He was taken to hospital and forcibly restrained. By Sunday, he was dead. Within the week, so were four of his colleagues - and 35 more were in hospital. Only 49 people worked there.") and quite a few people were concerned about long-term, low-level exposures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence

But we have small indications (Ramsden 2013, 2016) that too much linoleic acid (an omega-6 fat) could be detrimental. At the same time, canola and corn oil are rich in it and aren't correlated with higher risk of death in big observational studies.

Seed oils are probably not as bad as some fear, given that we don't see increased deaths associated with it in observational studies. But you might as well use olive oil (for more omega-3 fat) instead if you can afford it.

I think it's basically laughable to suggest that millennials have experienced more stress than earlier generations. (Not that it matters, but I'm an older millennial myself.)

Now, it genuinely might be the case that millennials are subjectively more "stressed out" than their predecessors, but that's a different claim. It's a claim I don't have any trouble believing, but the cause is likely widespread access and attention to negative stressors (via social media, for example), not the existence of a greater number of them.

Do you really believe that? That Earth will be uninhabitable within the lifetime of a person alive today? Or their grandchildren? No climate scientists argue anything remotely close to that outcome.

I think about them from a Policy stand point, I may recycle or by a sustainable product because I know about climate change, but I am not stressed over climate change

I am not stressed over wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, I oppose them from a policy stand point, I am sad and empathetic for the lives lost needlessly.

Even COVID, did not cause me any stress. I looked at the data, I isolated myself when appropriate, wore a mask when appropriate, and got vaccinated when appropriate I did not have an existential crisis of the mind where I was in fear that I was going to die, not at any point in the pandemic. Certainly not to the point where I have seen others be; out on the street screaming @ people that did not conform to societal or government demands or claiming those people are a "threat" to my life.

So I honestly have no frame of reference for people that have this "permanent mental load" where all of these things cause them soo much stress that is impacts their life.

Later in his early twenties my father was drafted. They also spent time doing bomb drills in elementary school because of the cold war, nuclear fallout was an actual worry.

>did I already mention that my and the later generations will face significantly less earnings than the generation of Boomers, and that income and wealth inequality also has risen constantly over the last decades?

I do worry about rising wealth inequality, but that is largely a factor of deficit spending and needing the fed to print money causing wealth transfer to the upper class. Unfortunately, most young people are all for the government spending even more money for various things which will only exacerbate the issue.

>(we sacrificed our youth for the at-risk population),

I dunno, the largest cohort of covid positive cases has always been the 20-30 age group by far.

Only the dead have seen the end of war. As far as stress on a populace goes, anyone my age (50) or younger has had it pretty easy. My parents' generation had to deal with the possibility of getting drafted to fight in Vietnam. My grandparents' generation had to deal with the much higher possibility that they were going to have to fight in World War II. A 20 year old trying to get some sleep because in the morning he is going to have to storm the beaches of Normandy, that's some stress. What my generation dealt with, stressful sure, but not as much.

>> the financial crisis

There's always going to be another financial crisis. My grandparents grew up during the Great Depression. The 70s had stagflation. I first learned how to freak out about the stock market in the late 90s. There was the 2008 financial crisis, and after that there was the longest economic expansion in US history. Do people just wipe that part out of their memories? Out of all of it, I would pick anything but the Great Depression.

>> anyone not completely ignorant already sees the catastrophic effects of climate change

When I was young, it was overpopulation, then a coming ice age, then ozone and acid rain, then global warming. If you look at what the scientists are actually predicting, it is that we will be much better off at the end of the century but not as much better off as if we had taken more action now.

>> we have a new crisis looming in the form of Russia destabilizing Western governments by propaganda and cyberwars

When I was a young teen, I seriously believed I would die in a nuclear war before I was 18. Now people are freaking out about Russia trolling people on the internet.

>> did I already mention that my and the later generations will face significantly less earnings than the generation of Boomers

Boomers started in what, 1946? In 1950, one third of the households in the US didn't have indoor plumbing. And you're jealous of them.

>> home ownership is ever more inachievable

The home ownership rate is lower than it was in 2000, higher than it was in 1990, around the same as it was in 1980, and higher than it was in 1970. Rental affordability is a little lower than in the past, mortgage affordability much higher (due to low interest rates). People change jobs less than they used to and they move less than they used to. Not really seeing peak stress here.

Sure, Covid was stressful for some people. Not for me, it's been the least stressful year and a half of my life. I don't see the whole fundamentally broken part. If you had told me that there was going to be a global pandemic that pretty much shut down the US economy for a time, I would have thought it would have turned out worse than it did.

Lead wasn't simply some trace component of paint, but was up to half by weight (dried), or 500,000 ppm in the US (and probably comparable if not worse elsewhere:

White house paint contained up to 50% lead before 1955. Federal law lowered the amount of lead allowable in paint to 1% in 1971. In 1977, the Consumer Products Safety Commission limited the lead in most paints to 0.06% (600 ppm by dry weight). Since 2009, the lead allowable in most paints is now 0.009%. Paint for bridges and marine use may contain greater amounts of lead.

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/leadtoxicity/safety_standards...

Leaded petrol had on the order of 0.5 -- 1 g/l lead, again, not trace amounts, which were discharged directly into the air. Much settled out relatively quickly, within a few hundred metres, as lead is heavy. Still, lead permeated cities and land adjoining roadways and expressways. And still does. Remediation is expensive, natural remediation takes centuries.

At 90 ppm, India's regulations seem to impose a maximum upper bound, and controls for incidental introduction. Given that total elimination is impossible, setting a maximum standard.

The US standard is also 90 ppm:

https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Business-Educat...

But that would be unjust. Imagine your car suddenly gets outlawed.

If you plan to have kids there, the test might be worth it for your peace of mind. If there are no kids I would not bother.

> children living within 1.5 miles of the Reid-Hillview Airport have elevated levels of lead in their blood, and that the problem gets much worse for those who live closer to or downwind from the airport. > ...children under the age of 18 living close to Reid-Hillview had blood lead levels over 1.8 micrograms per deciliter. In 3.2% of the children surveyed, that number was as high as 3.5 micrograms, and in 1.7% of children it was 4.5 micrograms. Average baseline lead levels in children across the U.S. are closer to 0.84 micrograms.

https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2021/08/06/new-study-finds-l...

In Canada you could be licenced to shoot outdoors on your own property (e.g. PAL + non-restricted firearm), but not be allowed to use the area habitually, or repeatedly as that would make it a shooting range. It seems like having a shooting gallery or plinking spot with persistent targets would fail the test.

But unless I eat dirt from the side of the road or drink rain water I should be fine ?

I remain tentatively skeptical of "saving" features in video games. They may be one of the great social ills of our time. Going back to the beginning if you lose may have been a healthy kind of frustrating.

Edit: doh, should have clicked on your link. That was the article.