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Comment by thinkcontext | Hacker News Reader

Millions of lives and $Ts in health damage has been done and continues to be done by lead[0]. And it was largely avoidable because the dangers were known.

99 years ago the League of Nations signed a treaty banning indoor leaded paint. The US, of course, declined to join and it took another 50 years before it took action. Concerns were raised about leaded gasoline, industry steamrolled the science.

And it was just a couple of months ago that the final country (Algeria) stopped producing leaded consumer road fuel.

For a good history see

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...

[0] An Update on Childhood Lead Poisoning https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5645046/

As many as 500,000 US children (2.5%) under 6 years have BLLs ≥5 µg/dL. Each lead-exposed child costs an estimated $5600 in medical and special educational services.7 Lead exposure-related cognitive impairments cost an estimated $50.9 billion annually in lost US economic productivity.6

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My big complaint is that

a) Leaded aviation fuel, an absolutely KNOWN hazard, has been given a pass for literal DECADES.

b) At some point you have to just put your foot down. Ban the sale leaded gas using planes after 1/1/2022. Grandfather in the old planes.

c) Ban the sale of leaded gas to fill planes with changes in registrations after 1/1/2023.

d) Ban the sale of leaded gas period after 1/1/2025.

Industry has been given (more) than enough time to solve this - and does not care.

I live near an airport, with a pregnant wife and a young child. The total hassle it is to deal with just old lead paint if you try and follow code is rediculous, but they still have planes flying over burning LEADED fuel!! WHY?

Most planes don't need leaded gas. Jet-A / Diesel etc can also be used in planes. And yes, I understand small, old GA planes may be impacted, but this has been on the radar for decades now.

"There is no known safe blood lead concentration; even blood lead concentrations as low as 5 µg/dL may be associated with decreased intelligence in children, behavioural difficulties and learning problems. As lead exposure increases, the range and severity of symptoms and effects also increase."

Damn, it makes so much sense that aviation fuel is leaded. I have been a fortunately healthy person for my life, but at one point I lived downtown San Jose (which for the non-locals has an airport in the middle of the city), right under the main landing/takeoff path. I got sick 6x a year or more. After 1 and 2/3 years, I realized that it was probably the planes and moved away, and now I haven't been sick since except maybe once or twice (over 3y).

Just awful.

It's unlikely to have been a direct cause given the (relatively) low levels of lead avgas generates, but it almost certainly has some effect.

The question is, given that it's so clearly a poison (maybe a top 10 poison) - why spray it into the air above residential neighborhood?

Lead impacts are around things like "anaemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioural effects of lead are believed to be irreversible."

Reality is measurable increases in lead concentrations in blood near airports is very small. But does look like it exists.

Large airplanes/jets do not use leaded fuels. Only small piston planes. Even right under the takeoff path, aviation lead exposure would only be a moderate proportion of your total lead exposure.

Interesting, I see what you are saying. Well, I guess aviation fuel byproducts aren't great to have sprayed on your home every day either way :)

While it's unlikely that you had significant lead exposure due to this as others have pointed out, I also wouldn't discount your issues with getting sick more often, particularly if it was upper respiratory illnesses - people who live under airport flight paths are exposed to up to 4x as much harmful exhaust gas byproducts, superfine particulates, and other nasty particles* vs baseline.

It's amazing that airports aren't required to purchase and relocate the (typically poor) people who are absolutely getting their lifespans shortened by living near an airport.

*(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32639745/)

Most airports, at the time there were built were located in a relatively remote area. The city typically moves closer to the airport, not the other way around. It would require an unreasonable amount of foresight to buy out all this (at the time quite empty) land ahead of time.

> b) At some point you have to just put your foot down. Ban the sale leaded gas using planes after 1/1/2022. Grandfather in the old planes.

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.

> Best estimates I've seen is that this would lower the total population burden from lead by well under 5%.

That sounds pretty great actually, for such a simple solution.

It's not absolutely a sure thing that there's any significant burden from aviation. Blood tests come up with a tiny, barely detectable difference near airports (well under 5% for those nearest the airport, and confounded: airports are correlated with low SES and therefore lead paint, etc, is also more prevalent). The most pessimistic estimates from first principles come up with 2-3% of the total population lead burden (more than an order of magnitude above what the blood tests imply, and the blood tests likely overstate the problem).

If you threw a few billion more at leaded paint remediation, I think you'd make much more of a difference. I think the aviation lead problem should get fixed, but because it's such a small part of the overall problem it makes sense to take a graduated approach instead of giving GA businesses the death penalty. Tax leaded aviation fuels, and use the proceeds to pay for leaded paint remediation.

If the tax was substantial I'd support this.

Graduated approach ignores the decades that have ALREADY been provided as an exception to the lead fuel rules that apply everywhere else - it's already been graduated.

> If the tax was substantial I'd support this.

Start at 10% with a commitment to ratchet it up by 4% per year or something. That's enough to start an immediate reduction without destroying the industry.

If you're making choices about engine overhaul now for an overhaul that will last you 7-8 years of light use, fuel costing 40% more at the end of that overhaul will definitely get your attention.

> it's already been graduated.

Doing nothing for decades when it was impossible; and then doing nothing for a decade or two when transition became possible; and then pushing the industry off the cliff is not graduated.

It's a small problem? I read recently that GA accounted for >50% of environmental lead exposure.

Perhaps that's wrong, but I distinctly remember the statistic and it stuck with me.

Source please. All the studies I've read have barely detected higher levels of lead near airports, and are confounded. All the estimates from first principles estimate that it's a very small proportion of population lead exposure, too.

airplanes can gradually transition

Except they can't, since there is no approved alternative.

The other problem is that even planes that can run unleaded gas often don't, because it's not available at the airport. Avgas is a tiny market and because of costs most FBOs can't or won't set up another fuel delivery infrastructure to run two fuels over some short transition period.

Because of this, an additional requirement on a replacement is also that it be safely mixable with 100LL in any ratio, because during the transition period this will happen as people fly from airports where it exists to airports where it doesn't.

This problem is being solved (https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/).

> Except they can't, since there is no approved alternative.

There's an increasing number of diesel engines for GA aircraft, and supplemental type certificates to retrofit them into the same. If 100LL got more expensive, you'd see more people opting for the diesels when an engine reaches the end of its life.

e.g. http://www.continentaldiesel.com/typo3/fileadmin/_centurion/...

Yes, it'd be really cool to end up with a lower-lead fuel that's safely combined with 100LL. That's been "imminent" for the last 25 years.

The poster above advocates for a "rip off the band-aid" approach. GA advocates for a gradual, painless transition that, in practice, will never happen. Surely there's some middle ground?

A post further down says that the first unleaded replacement for 100LL was actually just approved.

Swift UL94 has been to market for 3 years with very low uptake.

Because as far as I know the engines must have their type acceptance updates to reflect it's allowed use.

3 years is also basically a second at the speeds GA changes at.

Yes, technically speaking.

Swift charges $100 for a STC, and has coverage of two thirds of the GA fleet.

Really, all that needs to happen is an airport needs to decide that lead free is important to them and they'll pay the premium for Swift's fuel.

The slow uptake has more to do with it just not being all that available.

Yup-- why should an airfield bother with going to 94UL when it's more of a hassle (some planes can't take it, all planes need an STC).

But if you taxed the crap out of lead-containing fuels, I suspect more would be interested...

Fair enough, but that's not a replacement for 100LL since not all engines can use it. It's gotta be a pretty large FBO to have enough market to pay for setting up a distribution for UL94 in addition to 100 octane gas. Like, there are engines that were certificated to run on 80/87 avgas but no one sells that any more either. Today's avgas market just isn't large enough to make it worth offering two fuels.

About 2/3rds of GA has an STC available to burn it.

There's not going to be one single tidy drop-in solution for the entire market. That's why we should tax leaded fuels, and everyone can pick the appropriate solution for them. Some will pick diesel conversions. Some airfields will go 94UL and people will purchase STCs. Presumably some other people will take other paths. And those with the hardest time transitioning can instead pay the tax and burn leaded fuel, still.

Continental diesels still have "TBR" (time between replacements) instead of "TBO" (time between overhauls). That's a huge problem preventing their uptake.

Well, plus the fact that a new aviation engine runs $30-60k, which is about what an old, small, airplane is worth. It just doesn't make economic sense to replace those engines, you're effectively just trashing those planes.

https://www.aviationconsumer.com/aircraftreviews/aircraftste...

Data seems to imply that the diesel engine lifecycle cost is slightly better now than conventional engines, so electing for a diesel replacement instead of a conventional engine overhaul can make sense... but it's a razor thin difference.

If you made leaded fuels more expensive-- more airfields are going to want to move to UL94, and more people at overhaul time are going to go the diesel path, and the problem will gradually get better.

I was a child in a major city when leaded gasoline was prevalent and I live by an airport now. I probably see as many propeller airplanes in a year as I did automobiles in 5 minutes as a child playing in the street. This is also comparing an airplane off in the distance to a car running a few dozen feet away. So perhaps your recommended ban wouldn't move the needle at all when it comes to blood lead concentrations.

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.

Military propeller airplanes are almost all turboprops and do not burn leaded gasoline.

edit: perhaps "all", not "almost all", in the US.

Most planes don't need leaded gas. Jet-A / Diesel etc can also be used in planes. And yes, I understand small, old GA planes may be impacted, but this has been on the radar for decades now.

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?

I'm very happy with the recent progress in GA Avgas. My flying club recently switched from 100LL [1] to UL94 [2] with no appreciable change in aircraft performance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#100LL_(blue) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#UL94_(formerly_94UL)

There has been no push in the market to get small GA off leaded gas. There has been no extra tax even. As a result, new planes, being delivered today, are shipping with engines requiring leaded gas, which perpetuates this problem.

After decades - does it make public policy sense to still sell NEW planes that REQUIRE leaded gas?

I don't believe so.

Literally every other method of propulsion, some with much stronger claims in terms of life utility, have moved off leaded gas. Ie, the ambulance, the race cars the everything, except GA.

Reality -> GA has a well connected / rich pool of users with influence. If you had a bunch of poor minorities spraying even trace amounts of lead over someone's nice golf course my guess is you'd be getting well off activists to shut you down in no time for environmental or other reasons.

Which airplanes are on the market today that require leaded gas? Specifically which power plants?

Turbocharged Lycontinentals, and higher-compression (9.5:1 or better iirc) stock Lycontinentals.

Within the subset of certified, normal category piston aircraft, you will find one of these two on a sizable proportion of those airplanes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_O-360

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_IO-550

To my knowledge some ultralights use regular unleaded (called MOGAS in some aviation contexts) and of course anything that you can buy an airline ticket for outside of perhaps Alaska will use jet fuel.

I mean in current production aircraft.

It appears that most versions of the O-360 can run on mogas, or unleaded gas of some sort.

https://www.lycoming.com/sites/default/files/SI1070AB%20Spec...

Indeed, there does appear to be a 100UL drop in out here too.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2021/july/27/ga...

I think at least all models of the Cirrus, one of the best selling general aviation planes right now, require 100 octane gas.

To be clear, none require leaded fuel, per se, but until this year there was no approved unleaded 100-octane fuel.

On the contrary, there's now several unleaded options coming to market and now available at certain FBOs. UL94 seems to work well in continental and lycoming power plants that power most Cessna 1XX aircraft. The issue has largely been building the distribution network.

I think he is talking about GA 100L fuel. Which, as someone stated elsewhere, I think absolutely should be changed to 94UL across the board. I don't believe there is no possible way a small single prop GA plane simply cant run on unleaded gas. That seems eerily close to propaganda from Midgley himself. Some performance alteration without some small changes to the plane? Maybe. But cataosrophic outcomes even with some small changes? Highly unlikely.

I think that's because some GA planes still have engines designed 50+ years ago, like O-360: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_O-360

Exactly. The idea that you can't make an engine that runs on unleaded is rediculous. Airliners for example don't use leaded.

Yes, planes 50 years ago -> maybe those were designed for leaded. But the idea that we are selling new planes, today, that "only" run on leaded gas is a farce and goes to show how seriously aviation is taking the transition away from leaded gas (which has been delayed as I've said decades).

At some point you just lose patience.

Only piston engined planes used any fuel with lead, virtually no commercially operated flights use piston engines (sightseeing and bush pilots aside), so the vast majority, basically 95% of traffic in the skies is already using Jet-A, which does not contain lead.

Wait until you read up on Toxicologic Assessment of Jet Fuel which covers mostly JP-8, the military stuff, but it is also used in trucks, because they can! Or Toxicologic Profile of Jet Fuel which also covers the civil stuff, Jet A.

No Chemtrailer here, btw.

>industry steamrolled the science.

Not only that, industry paid for "science" that hid the dangers. People today however seem to strangely think this doesn't happen anymore.

It's genuinely hard to know how to make sense of information. I'm generally skeptical of "big anything", whether that's business or government. Incentives can be screwy at any scale, but once you get to very large numbers, incentives seem to simply go off the rails. Industry and governments have a pretty terrible track record of skewing data to suit their needs-- sometimes with a truly tragic consequences.

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.

I don’t know if it is really that incentives change when you get very big, as much as it is that you become more capable of achieving desires that are counter to the public good.

At smaller scales, your power isn’t enough to override the preferences of the masses. Get big enough, and you can.

While not impossible, it’s much harder to create false stats when going through clinical review with the FDA. Super double extra when the lives of the world are at stake and the total eyeballs on a single vaccine are so high.

But the processes are very flawed leading to the wrong stats being used to make decisions.

For example, an experimental vaccine isn't given out widely till there is good data that it is safe (often taking years).

However, for risky diseases (like COVID), as soon as there are even rough indications that it is safer than COVID, it makes sense to give it to everyone. Every month you spend doing more safety tests, millions of people die.

The same is happening right now for malaria treatments which are being trialled. Skipping the trial and handing it out untested will probably save more lives.

> For example, an experimental vaccine isn't given out widely till there is good data that it is safe (often taking years).

How is this an example of “the wrong stats being used to make decisions”? You believe that undergoing safety trials with control groups is a bad thing because they take time?

> However, for risky diseases (like COVID), as soon as there are even rough indications that it is safer than COVID, it makes sense to give it to everyone.

What if we find out several years down the road that the vaccine is causing a drop in IQ, affecting birth rates, etc.? Wouldn’t it have been nice to catch these things during the safety trials before injecting it into billions of people?

> You believe that undergoing safety trials with control groups is a bad thing because they take time?

You can always do more trials and more studies, but at some point the cost of delays outweighs the risks. A blanket "this is the degree of safety testing needed" for every single intervention makes no sense if the cost of that testing differs significantly — and when you have a rapidly spreading disease killing millions of people, the cost of delays is much higher than it would be if you're trying to cure the common cold.

No testing at all would be a really bad idea, but "we'll spend just as long testing this one as this as we would on a common cold vaccine" is also a really bad idea.

I'd also drive faster if I were rushing to the hospital with a dying friend, even though speeding is risky. You have to weigh risks and benefits and do what has the best expected outcome.

> What if we find out several years down the road that the vaccine is causing a drop in IQ, affecting birth rates, etc.?

What if we find out several years down the road that COVID-19 does these things? We have a better grasp on the potential side effects of the vaccine—which, after all, is much simpler than a virus—than we have on the potential side effects of the disease.

That's literal whataboutery and FUD.

Covid is a relatively known relatively high risk which has killed millions and left tens of millions injured.

A vaccine may cause problems. Possibly. Or it could also not cause problems.

So far there is no evidence to suggest that problems are particularly likely, or that they have been happening at all at significant risk levels.

The rational decision - clearly - is to deal with a severe immediate threat. Not to worry about something that shows no signs of happening because what if maybe perhaps could happen y'know.

What other reasonable choice is there?

A chief tool used by industry to deceive was to cast doubt on independent science and scientists. A popular book on misuse of statistical methods, one that I'd read and liked myself, How to Lie With Statistics, turns out to have been part of that effort, as detailed by Tim Harford in his own book, How To Make The World Add Up

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.

I don't really understand your argument. Are you trying to say that "How to Lie with Statistics" is wrong? That's an unbelievably bold assertion to make on an engineering-focused site where we regularly work with deceptive stats that the public eats up.

You don't? It's crystal clear to me: that book was paid for, as was its sequel, so industrialists could argue that statistics from independent researchers were not to be trusted. Whether or not the book was right or wrong is not part of that contention.

Wait, are you trying to say it's not wrong?

It was specifically paid for and used to cast widespread doubt on smoking leading to lung cancer. It tried to convince people that "the science isn't settled" when the evidence was overwhelming.

It's an incredibly disingenuous and cynical piece of work that posits truth does not really exist b/c all "experts" are just lying to you with an agenda. Therefore, you can't ever really know the truth, therefore keep smoking.

It is deceptive and misleading with an intent to promote specific goals and agenda.

The salient characteristic of propaganda is not that it is (entirely) false. It is that it serves a specific interest and agenda rather than being a good-faith, best-effort attempt to convey truth.

It's a fundamental conflict in communications dating at least to Plato and the philosophers vs. the sophists.

Propaganda is most effective when it wraps its intended payload in an attractive, largely truthful message, and acts to nudge its intended targets in a direction they're inclined to go already.

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

The primary rule of successful propaganda is "Don't lie about facts, control the interpretation."

False facts will get caught out. All you can do with an interpretation is argue about it.

You sure? Have you read/watched any news since 2016?

There are various methods. Control is one. The Big Lie another, direct attacks on trust and truth another. Sheer overlwhelming and distraction as well.

Absolute certainty is impossible, that is not an argument to not act. Completely agree.

I think that's taking things a little too far. How I see it, Darrell Huff was a writer, not an academic, and he wrote a number of books over the years about all sorts of stuff.

I presume he got a bee in his bonnet about statistics at some point, and wrote his 'How to lie with Statistics' and because this became such a hit, it was assumed he know what he was talking about, and hence the interest from the cigarette manufacturers, the senate etc. This in fact was a mistake, and his credentials for appearing for the senate should have been checked.

So, the key take away from the book for me is that Statistics is hard, it's easy to confuse yourself or produce dubious results, but i'd look elsewhere for information about how to avoid pitfalls, and how to spot dubious conclusions beyond the most simplistic manipulation he points out.

The US in particular seems to be full of either such naive types (where enterprise, state, science, NGOs, law, etc can do no wrong, and even if something happens, it's just some individual bad apples at worst) or the other extreme (pizzagate-aliens-they're coming for us conspiracy nuts).

The scientific method is absolutely trustworthy. People, however, are a different story.

Even worse, now we have the actual anti-science narrative where, say, the Big Evil Climate Lobby is making up global warming in the hopes of getting more grant money while your friendly neighborhood petrochem megacorporation is just trying to make do and provide jobs and petrol in your tank.

We've know much longer than that. From around 20 BC

"Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them" - Virtuvius VIII.6.10-11

And yet we still have people making the "but the science on climate change wasn't and still isn't absolutely definitive" defense of Michael Crichton in a different thread yesterday.

Climate change denialism is the lead poisoning denialism of the modern era. You can actually see the denialism happening in real-time with actual posters here on HN, this is the same way it worked back then, this is how people delude themselves into thinking they're making a scholarly defense of "facts and the scientific process" when in reality they're just buying into industry propaganda designed to play on that instinct.

Nobody need wonder how it might have happened, it's happening right before your own eyes in these very threads.

If you live near a small airport, you are probably still being poison by leaded fuel https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

> Each lead-exposed child costs an estimated $5600 in medical and special educational services.7 Lead exposure-related cognitive impairments cost an estimated $50.9 billion annually in lost US economic productivity

It's quite disturbing to phrase things this way.

Yes - the quantification of the problem helps with comprehension but also opens the door for balancing trade offs in a manner we'd likely find distasteful. If the lead industry generated 60 billion of completely new money I'd still be in favor of outlawing it even if it was a net loss for the economy - since general quality of life is lowered by lead poisoning (especially since it has been linked strongly to anger issues).

I don't see it as disturbing, just focused. This phrasing helps to put the problem into perspective from one particular point of view—the cost in economic productivity. It does not imply that this is the only cost, or that there aren't other equally valid perspectives to consider.

we have a similar issue going on now with hormone disrupters in basically in most hygienic products (shampoo, body wash), containers, beauty products. it's causing a lot of issues and there are studies showing this recently, it was connected to sudden deaths each year. we need an overhaul. if this was a bug or a glitch in some software it would have been fixed in a few weeks

I think Algeria was using up stockpiles rather than actively producing

Per the Wikipedia article, they continued to produce it until July 2021

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

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