Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I guess we should never have outlawed the addition of lead to gasoline?

No, rather long term and large scale peer reviewed studies would have to show that lead in gasoline does not cause harm in humans.

Real world is not black and white and we definitely should ban clearly poisonous or otherwise harmful (e.g. hormone mimicking) chemicals from food products and children’s utilities.

Point is if we keep going like this we might not ever arrive in a situation where everyday life is mostly free from dangerous compounds

That's an element. These are compounds. There are a lot more compounds than elements, and it's a lot easier to find one you can sub in to do the same thing.

(yes, the lead in gasoline was part of a particular molecule, too—which just proves my point, if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead—but you can't exactly outlaw carbon, so that approach won't work this time)

That's really moving the goal posts. Who's to say the fuel industry couldn't have chosen a different substance that's poisonous in some other way? It's fundamentally the same argument. Lead being a universally poisonous element just made the decision easy. I agree that bans can and probably often do backfire, but it's not as simple as either never banning things or instead whitelisting things to be allowed.

It's not moving the goalposts, the two actions are meaningfully different. Lead is basically always dangerous, so "no lead" is an easy call and has the desired effect. The lead, specifically, was causing the entire problem, and it'll keep doing so pretty much no matter how you arrange other elements around it. Some other compounds to replace it might be dangerous, but essentially every lead compound is going to be dangerous.

Carbon compounds, meanwhile, are practically endless and there's no one quality you can point to and say "that, that right there is the problem, ban that part". Piecemeal bans won't work.

They did actually, it's called MTBE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether#Regula....

Tetraethyllead is an element?

> (yes, the lead in gasoline was part of a particular molecule, too—which just proves my point, if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead—but you can't exactly outlaw carbon, so that approach won't work this time)

And that wasn't an edit, it was there from the beginning.

They didn't ban lead, they banned Tetraethyllead, an anti-knock compound used in gasoline.

>... if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead

I'm not sure what to make of that. The point of the ban was to keep lead out of the environment and people's blood levels which we did successfully. Lead isn't some sentient being looking to find it's way into our systems regardless of the actions of man.

> I'm not sure what to make of that. The point of the ban was to keep lead out of the environment and people's blood levels which we did successfully. Lead isn't some sentient being looking to find it's way into our systems regardless of the actions of man.

Yes—the "actions of man" might have been to create a different, also-useful-for-that-purpose lead compound, if they thought they could get away with it without someone putting a stop to it more or less immediately, just for the fact that it had lead in it. The trouble with many of these compounds is we can't point to a single easy-to-prove thing they have in common, like the presence of lead, as the cause of the harm—so you're left either testing for harm before the novel compound is included in products, or endless piecemeal bans with harm occurring at every step until, if we're fortunate, industries luck into compounds that are both the most economical and least-harmful of the remaining non-banned options.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com