Car, gas industry knew about health risks of lead, sold it for 100 years anyway | Hacker News Reader

Car, gas industry knew about health risks of lead, sold it for 100 years anyway

theconversation.com

Major discussion about this topic just a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

(611 points/88 days ago/411 comments)

As long as there are no criminal charges for such behaviour this won't change. Licking ice cream in a store is a 'terrorist threat' [1]. DuPont dumping chemicals for years leads to nice profits and a few settlements here and there [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/coronavirus-terrorist-...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200402143157/https://www.nytim...

Not sure what that ice cream story has to do with anything. People were licking ice cream and putting it back on the shelf during a pandemic.

I think it is supposed to show the contrast between how ordinary members of the public are punished for relatively minor crimes, but megacorporations get away with much worse things with impunity.

There are those who the law binds and does not protect, and those it protects but does not bind.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

Licking food in a grocery store during a pandemic isn’t an minor crime. It’s reckless endangerment.

The gp comment is feigning moral superiority but at the same time condoning some seriously f’ed up behavior. It undermines their whole point imo.

We should hold both corporations and super spreaders accountable for their actions.

Yeah see, I think companies that fuck the world for literally centuries to come are a lot more important to deal with than someone licking food.

Right now we put a lot more resources to deal with lickers than world fuckers.

“Just licking food” is a super disingenuous way of putting it. These aren’t people licking ice cream while in line at the checkout. They’re intentionally spreading an infectious, deadly disease for internet points.

There are plenty of other examples they could have chosen to make their point, like police brutality against minorities. How about Botham Jean who was shot in his own home while eating ice cream?

Again. Don't care. The damage is localized compared to what op is talking about.

Covid is highly infectious, there’s nothing localized about it. Those ice cream licks could be case 0 for thousands of infections and multiple deaths.

It’s a bad example, not sure why you’re defending it.

Because you're still missing the point on how bad that is compared to what these companies have done.

This is like being burned by a candle vs being burned by a nuclear fucking explosion.

Again, the amount of effort our system puts to punish and criminalize these people is not at all comparable to the protections they offer to the companies that do have that nuclear explosion level damage on everyone.

You're missing the entire point, and this thread is basically a great example of why we keep fucking up like this.

Regrettably, we humans just don’t have a good sense of scale.

> Regrettably, we humans just don’t have a good sense of scale.

Yep, and the people that we "elect" to make those big decisions rather go after the money and their own self interest.

The same thing is happening right now with plastic pollution. Plastic waste in the environment breaks down into smaller and smaller particles, eventually forming plastic nanoparticles. These nanoparticles are capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and entering the brains of aquatic organisms and mammals [1].

At this point I'm not sure there's a great deal of research about the consequences of that contamination, but I think most of us will agree that it's not likely to turn out well.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7282048/

That's scary stuff. Especially because there's basically no going back.

I remember seeing a documentary about orcas, which are basically being poisoned and starved to death by us in certain locations. It was a Jean-Michel Cousteau documentary, and although I can't find the video I remember, he had his children tested for poisons. If I recall correctly, his son actually tested a bit high for mercury, and Jean-Michel Cousteau was emotionally shell-shocked because he is one who perfectly understands the dangers.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/seafood-crisis-a-vital-co_b_2...

It is absolutely shocking how we have just completely destroyed the environment and the ocean over the past two centuries. Whales off the cost of Thailand have had to adopt new feeding techniques because the water is so polluted and hypoxic, fish stay very close to the surface to get more oxygen.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/podcast/feb18/nop13-hypoxia.ht...

It isn't hyperbole just how moronic humans are with our technology. For every problem we "solve", we create hoards of new problems with often devastating effects.

And you can still buy leaded fuel today decades and decades later due to the "temporary" exemption for airplanes while they implement alternatives (hint - they won't while they can just burn leaded gas).

The problem here is the people burning the leaded gas are not the ones impacted - babies, pregnant women not burning it but impacted by it most significantly. Old guys with $ (average, yes there are amazing young female pilots) flying GA planes but less likely to be impacted.

Found a decent article about this:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/42218/if-leaded-fuel-is-so-bad...

G100UL is available now. 110LL will likely be phased-out.

Disclosure: I work for GM, anything I write here is solely my own opinion.

First off: I appreciate the article. I think modern safety culture has vastly improved quality of life. I think we need to be very aware of harms that accrue at industrial scale. I think we only get good results when people are intentional about understanding and dealing with negative externalities. I think safety and security require leadership. We need to guard against motivated reasoning.

All that being said, this article is very much written from the present perspective. I am NOT arguing that ethyl lead is or was ever good or acceptable, or that GM or oil companies should have ever fought to allow it.

The author talks about an industrial incident where a significant number of workers were poisoned. It is important to acknowledge the harm here, but it should also be viewed in an industrial context. There are risks in industrial and lab activities, even today. Chemical and pharmaceutical processes have precursors and reagents that the public is never exposed to in anything like the amount present in the lab. For instance, the amount of thimerosal is injectable medicines is miniscule to an individual patient, but in the lab or industry context it is absolutely a risk.

We now know that the exposure to the public of lead from gasoline was never at an acceptable level, but the author uses an industrial incident, not public exposure for their example.

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The other thing that is difficult for modern readers to understand is how ignorant the general public was about risk at scale. Bear in mind that people who work and manage industry come from the general public, so while they may have more knowledge, it takes a while to understand facts and then translate that to changing motivations.

For instance: If I run an artisanal lead smelter or mercury still in my backyard, I would adding some amount of lead or mercury to the environment around me. I would be causing some disease to people; but it would be limited to a small area.

As those operations scale up, the harms would spread exponentially.

For another example, compare wood fire emissions to diesel emissions.

This seems really really obvious, so one wonders why anyone would participate; and it's easy to blame the profit motive and evil corporations. I also see a simple bias towards doing work. I have some job to do, so I do that job. As I do that job, I am creating risks and possibly causing harm. My drive is to get the job done, and I only have so many resources for assessing harm.

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IMHO many of this stories (around lead but also other thinks) show less how "evil"/"reckless" the industry is but more about how broken the US law is wrt. regulating things.

I most stories which still apply today it's often "oh in EU this is heavily restricted or forbidden or tax wise penaltized since a long time, in some member state since before the EU was founded..

Not that the EU doesn't has there own problems.

But still especially wrt. chemicals the US non-regulation is often just outright absurd.

The reason I'm so annoyed by this as a non US citizen is that due the the huge influence of the US it's is nearly always affecting many non-US countries negatively and sometimes is outright forced onto them. (But so does the EU, especially wrt. some brain-dead copyright laws, but less often with serious well known health risks).

I never researched why but I always found it interesting how much stricter chemical laws in the EU were compared to the US and then in the inverse how the US really clamped down on diesel compared to the EU where it was much more popular and in many ways less strict.

I'm not sure if the actual limit on exhaust put up by the EU are more lax then the ones but up by the US.

But what was lax was the control, and what was ridiculous the consequences (or lack of such, at least short term) when wide spread manipulation was found.

By over protecting certain companies some countries like especially Germany have maneuvered themself in quite a bad situation both image wise and economical wise. And it's not just cars in some other areas similar ill fated decisions are done too, where overprotecting certain companies impeded innovation and made that companies less able to compete on a global marked.

The author of this piece seems interesting, Bill Kovarik, a professor of communications.

I'd run across an earlier article on the history of lead's use in industry --- not just fuel, but pain and elsewhere --- based on some writing by economist Joel Mokyr. The piece struck me as hagiographic and excusing the practice, and lead me to digging into both the history and messaging about lead. The industry, notably the American Lead Company (since aquired by Sherwyn-Williams), and its "Little Dutch Boy" ads for white paint were specifically intended to convey the message that lead paint was a safe and healthy option for children.

And lead wasn't some fractional component of the paint: it was as much as half of the paint by weight. (Current acceptable standards are measured in parts per million.)

I ended up writing the journalist, who apparently forwarded my email to Mokyr. We had a brief exchange a part of which addressed the role of communications technologies in changing society. Mokyr's response disappointed me, I dug further, and discovered Elizabeth Eisenstein, whose major work addresses the printing press as an agent of change (with books and papers of similar titles). Mokyr dismissed her argument, of course.

Kovarik has his own book, a dissertation, and a few YouTube videos up which I'd recommend for anyone interested in communications and its role on society.

Not to stick up for these guys, but haven't we known about the health risks of lead since ancient Roman times?

Yes.

That being said, to this day TEL remains the cheapest way to add octane to gasoline, if one disregards the public health issue. So it's not as simple as evil corporations profiting from poisoning people, customers got to enjoy cheaper gas as well.

Clearly, in retrospect, it was a poor tradeoff. Hence the argument for regulation, as the government is the entity that ought to weight society wide tradeoffs instead of individual companies or persons optimizing their own benefits.

The running theme here (cheaper gas or more profit) seems to be putting the value of money over the value of human health.

This seems to be a repeated theme throughout United States culture, it is a bad thing

The health risks of asbestos were known since 1898, yet they still kept on selling the stuff and ruining thousands of lives. There are many other stories like this. The invention of the "legal person" was a mistake.

How is "invention of the 'legal person'" related to "selling the stuff and ruining thousands of lives"?

I think OP is alluding to the fact that often the most severe penalty a legal person could possible be given is a fine. I.e. a slightly lower profit that year. And that could be seen as a cost of doing business, nothing disruptive.

Compare that to saying that an organization is a bunch of individually liable people. Now you can take away their freedom, or deport, or whatever. Much more at stake for the physical people making the actual decisions.

> The invention of the "legal person" was a mistake.

Oh yes totally companies are constructs not people.

You mean the 100 years during which there were few cars on the road, meaning the overall lead contamination of the environment was small, and it only became a problem as the number of cars increased? Ok

Apropos long-form read about TEL:

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth

I don't get how you could know and still do it. I mean they drove, sat in, were around cars, so they literally poisoned themselves knowing full well what they were doing.

When all the customers die off, the market will regulate itself.

It doesn't because the people most affected are not the main customers!

The further the negative affected is "away" from the one who gives direct marked feedback the less does marked self regulation work.

Similar the more the negative effect is subtle affecting people often in a non-obvious roundabout (but potentially still massive) way, the less does free marked self regulation work.

Which on our modern Globalized, hyper Complex, high tech World means:

It can't work well, potentially not at all in some areas.

Some would say that's the intended goal (solving the over population problem).

There is no over population problem in many of the worlds countries. (In some especially in the EU it's the opposite).

Some of the statistically overpopulated countries work okay with it (e.g. Singapore, Japan).

Most of the "problem causing" over population is in Asia and parts of the middle east. (Which doesn't mean they cause problems for others, but there are overpopulated countries which have "some" problems cooping with it.)

So why should any regulation affecting mostly Western states at all matter wrt. over population?

Leaded gas still leaking and in the air from most every prop plane at every airport.

If you live near an airport you really, really should consider moving away.

This is why being skeptical of big-business claims is warranted. Something to remember while big-pharama is pushing new vaccines as the only answer to Covid. People may well look back on this time the same way we look back on big-oil and big-tobacco today.

I'm certain that's how we'll look back on this period. After a century of destroying all other disciplines of medicine so that pharma reigns supreme who is surprised that they're flexing there monopoly on healthcare. You can't go to a hospital and get acupuncture, massage or herbal medicine for covid, it's only oxygen, remdesivir or other pills.

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