Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair
attheu.utah.edu
attheu.utah.edu
Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.
In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).
That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.
There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.
Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.
Not to simplify but if you have to make a decision shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?
no.
Check your public library.
The 'greater good' has arguably PREVENTED much more hurt of people than it has ever hurt. Meanwhile companies have PROVEN time and time again that they WILL hurt people when left to their own devices. In environmental policies. In pay policies. In employment policies. In EVERY aspect possible.
Yes, not just environmental, all kinds of money stuff. The more money can be how it gets on steroids.
But this says a lot here:
>not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic
With greed involved you can follow the money to an extent, you find lobbyists on both sides of every controversy, sometimes chalking up wins, other times losses. But they stay in business and grow by compromising the greater good with as little profit loss from those paying them the most.
They might switch roles when they lobby in favor of ordinary citizens one time, and squarely against in a future campaign. But they never actually switch sides, the least costly thing to compromise is the "greater good", which ideally from their point of view is intangible, versus actual money, which their clients are usually counting before they have earned any.
It's politics, all regulations are hard to pass, but as lobbying has increased, the difficulty of having good legislation in favor of the greater good is becoming less possible.
It just costs too much to have a seat at the table.
If people want to have good things, it might become completely dependent on older regulations which were in their favor before it got too expensive to do that any more.
Our society has an IRC/USENET problem.
Think pesticides and genetically modified plants for example.
Imagine I open a auto repair center and I perform oil changes. It would cost me money to have used oil hauled away or I could dump it down the drain. You probably support a requirement that I pay for the service.
I'm sure there are regulations that cause actual harm to small businesses that have little or no value but I wonder what percentage it would be of the total.
which isn't to argue that they shouldn't make sense. or that they should be used to tilt the playing field due to corruption, but on the balance claiming that we are currently overregulated is pretty indefensible.
I also don't agree on the principle that regulations are "harmful" or "helpful." Rather, you have to define who the regulation harms, and who it helps. For example antitrust enforcement harms shareholders and some employees of very large firms, but it helps many employees and arguably improves the landscape for competition between many smaller firms. So whether a regulation is preferable comes down to values.
In the case of leaded gas, it harms basically everybody, but it helps fuel companies, so it was an easy thing to change.
Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumers at the gas pump.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...
In an age of natural rubber components, poorly sealed fuel systems with steel tanks and aluminum carburetors pretty much anything other than ethanol is the "right choice".
And once they ruled out ethanol they settled on lead because it was cheap/profitable. Obviously they chose wrong, they should've picked something more expensive but less terrible.
These weren't cartoon villains with monocles twirling their mustaches. They were normal humans making pragmatic decisions based on the constraints they faced. Without knowing the details people cannot understand what future similar fact patterns may look like.
That said, it should be no surprise to anyone that nobody wants to talk about "well we don't know how bad the harm of leaded exhaust is, we know it's not good, but it's diffuse and undefined so we'll round it to zero/negligible" type decision making, for that sort of unknown rounds to zero logic underpins in whole or part all manner of modern policy discourse.
Actually, moisture problems are from using things like homemade alcohol or alcohol from unknown sources, where the likelihood of it already containing a sizable percentage of water has been a problem since the Model T days.
And if that water has a bit of an aggressive pH, it can have an effect on aluminum components.
This is just not a problem with gasoline-alcohol blends from reputable suppliers unless there is serious failure in the supply chain after that, where any fuel would have been contaminated by water regardless. The fuel-grade alcohol is tested before it is added, then the finished gasoline fully analyzed afterward.
Neither moisture nor corrosion is a problem with fuel ethanol or methanol, and when you see convincing information to the contrary (like from a pro mechanic) it often originates from misguided sources, "old wives' tales" for which actual evidence existed without being well-understood. But sometimes the most professional are the ones who don't take any chances, whether "common knowledge" is factual or not, if it doesn't hurt, no big deal.
Miscellaneous polymer compounds were the real question for cars that were not originally made for modern alcohol mixtures.
Ethanol just doesn't absorb moisture into your fuel tank by itself, even from a very humid environment.
Not any more than plain hydrocarbon fuel. In old ventilated fuel tanks, extreme temperature cycling under very humid conditions draws moist air into the tank when the fuel shrinks or is consumed. Kilos of cold fuel and cold metal can continue to condense moisture from the air, when the dew point is greater than the temperature of the tank. After a while you can get grams or ounces of water rolling around in the bottom of the tank. This could build up and stall out the vehicle or keep it from starting.
If it was only an ounce or two of water at the bottom of the tank full of all hydrocarbons, it would actually help to add a gallon of plain (good) alcohol to help dissolve the separated water into the gasoline so it can pass through harmlessly like it always has since gasoline has always had trace amounts of water anyway. Condensation is about as clean as rainwater so it's nothing the engine hasn't seen.
When most mechanics see something like this it has already gotten way out of hand, and there have been waves of anti-alcohol propaganda disseminated through time which reinforce the superstitious component.
Another problem from the '80's was when you do first start using alcohol-containing gasoline in an older car, it can break up varnish that has built up in the tank for years which never would come off until some alcohol came along. This could be a few grams, end up clogging the fuel filter, and the car stalls out no different than from water in the fuel line. Direct cause-and-effect relationship undeniably due to the use of alcohol, with many independent observations. Not a water problem, but who's keeping score.
Just not any more of a problem in the 21st century, similar conditions are so rarely encountered now.
TEL was patentable, but those patents were long expired before there was a big push to eliminate leaded gas.
It’s really a collective action problem. Nobody wants their gasoline to be more expensive than other companies’. So everyone has the incentive to use the cheapest ingredient. If you ban that ingredient, prices go up. But since everyone's prices will go up, you remove the competitive disadvantage.
But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).
The way I think about it, the entirety of global civilization is massively, massively subsidizing carbon emission.
[1] https://theclimatecapitalist.com/articles/gas-should-cost-13... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/phildeluna/2024/11/29/will-dire...
And the whole circus around it, manufacturing (and extracting the natural resources for that) of all the machinery for it, clearing land to place it (and all the NIMBY circus), all the energy generation for it, the transmission lines, the maintenance, the burying of the captured carbon. It's all going to lead to lots of pollution and CO2 emissions even if the things are powered by 100% green energy.
It's just a pipe dream of the people looking for a quick fix so we can continue doing what we've been doing.
But we'll just need so hellish many of them to make a dent in global CO2 levels in time to prevent the worst effects of climate change. It's just impossible.
The only way to really fix things is not emitting the stuff in the first place but most people prefer putting their fingers in their ears.
We already knew lead was toxic before we started putting it in gasoline. Even the guy that invented it got sick from exposure and people died from exposure in their plants in the first years of operation. The problem is that we somehow require evidence that something is unsafe but don't require any evidence that its safe in the first place.
We're doomed.
No qualifiers whatsoever. All environmental regulations are good as far as this person is concerned.
The only thing I don't like about the paper straws is that they're worse, they're coated with pfas and they disintegrate while drinking causing it to be ingested where the previous straws didn't. In that particular case yes I think banning them was the wrong move, or at least the paper straws were the wrong replacement.
But the need to reduce single use plastics, yeah that's crystal clear.
"We need to reduce single use plastics" + "Banning plastic drinking straws reduces single use plastics" => "We need to ban plastic drinking straws" is a logic trap, and we've got to stop falling for it and ones that pattern match to it.
Does it feel good? Does it have good optics? Will it get someone somewhere reelected? These are not scientific questions.
Is this an effective thing to mandate? What does it actually do (as opposed to what it seems like it will do)? Is it literally even better than doing nothing instead? These are scientific questions.
I believe policy decisions should be governed by the latter far more than by the former.
But it is funny to me that, under the interpretation you're (facetiously!) suggesting, if someone believed that sincerely then they would essentially be trying to "attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence"... Presumably because that has the benefit of assigning the fault to whichever side this particular person happens to like less.
Out-group's malice is much easier for many to stomach than in-group's stupidity.
1. Give them some goodwill for doing something for the environment.
2. Distract from the things that did matter. They were happy to replace the straws in their drinks if that meant that people thought less about the burning of Amazonas to create graze-land for their hamburgers.
3. It made the environmentalists look like fools.
I don't question the "in-group stupidity" (I can think of some other examples of, let us say, misdirected campaigns.) On the other hand, considering what we have learned from the actions of anything from tobacco to fossil to pharmaceutical, you don't need to be particularly paranoid to suspect conspiracies both here and there.
https://www.science.org/content/article/blow-environment-epa...
You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion.
Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.
Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do not have such clear cut costs and benefits.
For example smoke and soot from combustion or dust particles from tires and brakes.
https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/indoors/air/pmq_a.ht...
Breathing in unhealthy levels of PM2.5 can increase the risk of health problems like heart disease, asthma, and low birth weight. Unhealthy levels can also reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy.
Outdoor sources include vehicle exhaust, burning wood, gas and other fuels, and fires. Particle pollution can also travel long distances from its source; for example from wildfires hundreds of miles away. Outdoor particle pollution levels are more likely to be higher on days with little or no wind or air mixing.
It wasn't easily replaced. For many decades there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives.
Presumably, you mean there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives for around the same price as tetraethyllead.
Octane ratings can be increased sans Pb if needed. Trouble is the extra refining and reduced yield increases costs which consumers weren't prepared to pay for.
In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA.
For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others"
Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health.
I wonder if removing lead would meet the new standard.
"China and India have the right to industrialize themselves using the same tools Western countries have used. China is leading the world in alternative energy manufacturing making clean energy profitable and India is the 4th largest renewable energy producer."
2. Germany or at least the EU can and should impose a carbon fee on imports related to a given nations carbon emissions/reductions.
3. Economically transitioning to renewables is better for a nations economy than continuing to burn fossil fuels anyway. Renewables are cheaper.
Pointing to another bad actor as an excuse to continue to be a bad actor we learn is not a moral position somewhere around 5 years old.
This was a case of zealotry and overregulation egged on by puritanical ideologs without full consideration of the consequences.
We correctly banned fluorocarbons as refrigerants in systems where they would not be properly recycled, such as domestic refrigerators, air-conditioning systems incuding those in vehicles, and like. This made for good regulation, and it made sense.
The volume of CFCs with other specislist applications was miniscule by comparison, and for most of these recovery, capture and recycle systems along with protocols for use could have been implemented.
Instead, we stupidy put an outright ban on just about every CFC in sight, many of which have no direct equivalents that are anywhere near as effective as CFCs, and many are dangerous and inflammable and form explosive mixtures with air.
Right, in one fell swoop we banned many of the most useful chemicals ever invented. Little wonder these's now a backlash to overregulation. If Montreal were to be repeated today the zealots would have to take more of a backseat.
If India and China build coal plants, it's because they have coal. If they had natural gas, like the US, they'd build natural gas plants.
Murder is bad? Well that's a bit hypocritical considering that the Golden State Killer killed 10 more people than I did!
I also think this pattern of critique is dismissible on its face once stated explicitly: "Oh you are spending your time trying to change things that are within the scope of your own political power, while ignoring similar things that are outside of the scope of your political power? Hypocritical!"
The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough.
If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.
Here's one example: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...
I mostly agree with you, but it is worth paying attention to the details.
> But Casa Joaquin’s neighboring, overwhelmingly white homeowners could have used CEQA to demand costly studies and multiple hearings before Berkeley officials.
Important to note that white people are well-represented at UC Berkley too. https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
> More recently, a series of court rulings that culminated last year nearly forced Berkeley to withhold admission of thousands of high school seniors...
Graduating high-school seniors are also known as incoming freshman or legal adults.
> ... because the state’s judges agreed with NIMBY neighborhood groups that population growth is an inherent environmental impact under CEQA.
Ok, let's see how big the UC school system is...
> The University maintains approximately 6,000 buildings enclosing 137 million gross square feet on approximately 30,000 acres across its ten campuses, five medical centers, nine agricultural research and extension centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2017/chapt...
I'm not seeing evidence that protestors were primarily NIMBYs and pesky white homeowners. I can find several articles citing _student_ protests.
> “It’s students who set up People’s Park in the first place, so it’s our place to defend it,” said Athena Davis, a first-year student at UC Berkeley who spoke at the rally. “It’s up to students to reject the idea that our housing needs to come at the price of destroying green space and homes for the marginalized.”
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/01/30/protesters-tear-down...
Using land efficiently in walkable places is one of the most environmentally friendly things we can be doing, and supposed "environmentalists" sought to block it using "environmental" rules!
If that's not NIMBYism to you, you have blinders on.
I'm sure there are better examples to illustrate your point
> homes for people to live in
Student housing. Which likely means partially-furnished studios with shared bathrooms and a kitchenette at best. This isn't the useful housing folks are asking for.
That kind of "wait, no, not THAT kind of housing, not HERE" is textbook NIMBYism.
There may have been some student protestors, but the money behind the legal challenges were all wealthy local NIMBYs.
To me, it seems UC wants to bulldoze a park famous for homeless camps and replace it with student housing. Pro-development is trying to cast the UC expansion in the same light as folks asking for affordable housing. But, UC is not providing useful housing for residents of Berkley.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...
That's an opinion I encounter constantly and it's a meme that was manufactured in PR company meeting rooms, right wing think tanks, and neo-classical economists theoretical models of how the world works.
So, instead, California continues to mostly build single family housing sprawl into natural habitats.
A clear example of environmental regulation hurting the environment and the climate. And of course the affordability of housing.
>Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
I've never said all environmental regulation is good. That would be stupid, but you should have evidence based reasons for wanting to repeal or modify a regulation.
Existing regulation was put in place for a reason and those reasons likely still matter. Even if the regulation is falling short of having unintended consequences.
we should either delete the regulations, or add exemptions for the infrastructure we need to build to avoid climate disaster
this is a time sensitive issue for our environment. every day spent debating regulatory nuance is a day wasted
at this point I prefer drastic decisive action over continued inaction: delete the regulations and re-introduce them
*I am not going into immense detail here. It is admittedly a bit more complex than this, but this is a reasonable summary
[0] https://youtu.be/TKN7Cl6finE?si=CR4SjVK5_ojk-OKq [1] https://www.planningreport.com/2015/12/21/new-ceqa-study-rev...
Which fits with OP’s assertion that it does “more harm than good.” (Fortunately, restricting the private right of action would curtail a lot of the harm. On the national level I’m pretty much at the point of wanting NEPA repealed.)
One of the biggest problems today is that urban planning has basically evaporated. Local and state governments don't plan towns anymore. Things are left to developers who have no other concern than to run a street off a major road and plop a few houses down, sell, and move on to the next project. No thought is given to traffic or public services or walkability or public transportation. No care is given to integration with existing urban structures. Instead of mixed-use zoning or building houses around a common public space, which are historically the more common and sensible form of urban planning, we end up with car-dependent suburban dead zones, suburban sprawl.
This should be receiving more attention from environmentalists, as urban planning is intimately related to environmental issues.
And in many cases, single family homes are perfectly fine. You don't build skyscrapers in the Catskills. So they're not the issue. The issue is how they're arranged. Look at how old towns, even in the US, were or are constituted (at least those that have remained unscathed by Robert Moses-style mutilation). Plenty of single family homes arranged around a discernible town center. Walkable. The density consists of building around a town center instead of building willy-nilly along a road, because some strip of farmland has come up for sale. (This has the incidental defect of building on fertile land, now lost permanently to residential space.)
Now the cost of solar and storage are dropping at a rate I doubt nuclear is ever going to make a significant comeback. I'm not opposed to it, but I wonder if the economics will ever be favorable even with regulatory reform.
Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.
The worst possible case for water-moderated reactors is uncontained meltdown. And it's not _terribly_ horrible. You will get contamination with volatiles, mainly cesium. But there's not a lot of it in the reactor, so it'll affect only a small area around the plant. Some fuel might get initially mobilized by steam explosions, but again, only a fraction.
The worst case for a graphite reactor is an uncontained core fire. That can burn for weeks and spread a significant part of the fuel as particulates over large territories (Chernobyl).
Is it likely? Nope. But there are black swan events: earthquakes, mega-hurricanes, meteorite strikes, Godzilla attacks.
That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.
I can imagine a future in which every data center has a little baby nuclear plant built right next to it. Watts per acre may become a significant measurement of density. Solar’s environmental impact is of course dramatically overstated by its opponents, but it won’t be when we scale it up and have to start slashing forests for it.
Fair point that renewables may have a practical expansion limit, but for the time being are, by far, the cheapest option so a data centre is still going to prefer that source of power to the greatest extent possible, thereby leaving gas/nuclear only as reserve — of which nuclear has not proven to be cost effective at. Geothermal, hydro, etc. are hard to beat, but where you aren't sitting on the perfect environment, generally speaking, wind+solar+gas is about as good as it gets on a cost basis.
Likewise, an even bigger "disaster" at Fukushima--that killed nobody. (The deaths from the evacuation are not deaths from the incident--they wouldn't have died if they had stayed put.)
Nobody's arguing for more fossil. But nuclear isn't an option either.
There may be good reasons not to pursue nuclear (high complexity and upfront cost), but by the overall numbers I don't think pollution or death rate make that case
Because coal mining releases more radiation into the world than nuclear power.
...But yes; with the efficiency and price of solar, wind, and batteries now, nuclear makes much less sense.
But the price of batteries is far, far too high for renewables to make sense.
That's so much not the case now that renewables + batteries were by far the largest source of new generation in the US (yes, the US, with Trump actively trying to destroy them) last year.
Look up some of the new information coming out about them recently. Here, I'll give you a relevant video I watched recently to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM (channel is Technology Connections)
Reality: arguing for renewables over nuclear actually ends up making more fossil fuel use as the renewables are not viable.
I don't know the numbers for Fukushima, but let's consider Three Mile Island. Same basic problem--some radioactive noble gas needed to be released to avoid trouble (and they actually released it rather than panic.) You are standing at the fence line, what do you do? Let's say you evacuate....hey, there's a street here. Cross it? Nope--it was more dangerous to walk across one ordinary street than to stay put.
And yet we still build hydroelectric dams
Getting rid of LNT would allow higher doses to workers, and the way it makes nuclear cheaper is by having less shielding around the reactor.
But if you look at how recent reactors like the AP1000 failed, it's not so much because of the mere quantity of concrete. In fact, one of the big advantages of the AP1000 is that it used a fraction of the concrete and steel of prior designs. The real problem at Vogtle were construction logistics, matching up design to constructible plans, and doing that all in an efficient manner.
The construction process didn't run over budget and over timeline because of environmental regulations, that happened because we don't know how to build big things anymore, in combination with leadership asking for regulatory favors like starting construction before everything has been fully designed, which gave them more rope to hang themselves with.
I don't know the specifics of why France forgot how to build, at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, but I imagine it's a similar tale as in the US. High labor costs, poor logistics, projects dragged out, and having to pay interest on the loan for years and years extra with every delay.
If there's somebody with more specifics on how unnecessary regulation is killing nuclear, I'd love to see it. But after watching attentively and with great interest since ~2005, I've become so disillusioned with nuclear that I doubt we'll ever see it have success in the West again. Factories and manufacturing have seen productivity go through the roof over the past 50 years, while construction productivity is stagnant. Playing to our strengths, and using our very limited construction capacity on building factories rather than building generators, seems far wiser on the macroeconomic scale.
https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...
I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?
The stilted phrasing in the report from Salmon Business definitely does not sound very credible, but marine life protection is definitely a real thing with nuclear and all fuel-burning electricity generation
The vast quantities of water needed to cool nuclear (for every kWh of electricity, 2 kWh of waste heat must be discarded) can have significant impacts on wildlife. In the past, we just devastated ecosystems but most modern countries decided they didn't want to do that anymore.
This is not a nuclear regulation, it's a "thermal plant" regulation, it's just that nuclear needs more cooling than, say, combined-cycle gas because nuclear's lower temperatures are less efficient at converting heat to electricity.
At a mere $700M, even dropping all marine life mitigations from Hinkley Point C wouldn't help much with affordability. If they could drop $7B of costs from Hinkley then it may start to have a halfway-competitive price, but it still wouldn't be very attractive.
And the cost overruns are to a large degree due to regulations--specifically, changing regulations. The environmentalists have destroyed nuclear by forcing delays and changes, that is the *majority* of the cost. Especially the delays.
I just don't like the general attitude that because you can find something to disagree with that environmental regulation as a general rule is bad. It isn't.
There are thousands and thousands of pages of environmental regulations. Obviously people are going to be able to find some things that need to be revisited, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Nothing should be repealed without evidence and in many cases amendments are more prudent than repeals.
Literally, in the UK you can’t build if there’s a protected bat species in the area.
The alternative is not to have no environmental regulation. California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.
Says whom?
California has a huge population. California has a massive water shortage problem. California has wide areas vulnerable to wildfires. California has piles of small ecosystems that are fragile and can be easily wiped out.
Saying California could copy some states like Iowas regulations makes negative sense.
- the extreme cost and time spent on mandatory Environmental Impact Reports
- it allows pretty much anyone to sue projects over just about anything, which can also add many years before projects can start
None of this has anything to do with California specific environmental concerns
In Massachusetts you can't clear shoreline. Specifically, if you buy waterfront property on a pond / lake, you can't clear the shoreline to make a beach in your backyard. You can only use what used to be there before the law was passed. There's even restrictions on building close to shorelines, so if you want to build, you need to find an existing building and renovate.
Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.
Are you prevented from fresh water swimming because you can't fabricate a beach for yourself, even if you own the property next to it? Seems like a strange complaint
Besides, half the fun of the "beach" is the clearing where you can sit and read a book or play in the sand.
Ok, strong example here: the long term efforts to stop forest fires caused build up of fuel that should have burned up in small fires which then instead burned up ecosystems which evolved for small forest fires and instead were destroyed in large ones.
That's a well intentioned environmental policy that had terrible effects.
Fuel efficiency programs with the goal of reducing emissions with exceptions for work vehicles killed small trucks and meant a ton of people who do approximately 0 work drive around enormous vehicles that were designed big to match the exception criteria.
That's another one.
Ethanol to replace gasoline is also an enormous negative consequence waste that started as an environmental program.
Things don't just work because you want them to and programs aren't automatically right because of what they intend to do.
Far too many people argue for things they don't understand at all because of the surface intention of them and treat discussion about them blasphemy. (I chose uncontroversial negative examples because I don't want to get sidetracked into arguments about my examples with zealots)
1) They become political. Rules are made (or not made) to appeal to voting blocks rather than by evaluating the science.
2) There is a strong tendency not to destroy that which exists. By any reasonable standard coal filed powerplants should not exist.
3) (Could be considered part of #2) There is a strong tendency to look at risks in isolation rather than in the marketplace. We should not be aiming to make industries as safe as practical, we should be aiming to make the outcome as safe as possible. These are very different things! The extreme example of this is electricity. Coal is ~10x as dangerous as oil which is ~10x as dangerous as natural gas which is ~10x as dangerous as nuclear. The risk to society is measured in deaths (or other harm) per terawatt-hour, not by whether any given generator is as safe as it reasonably can be.
Needless to say, I disagree with your assessment. Every [action by governments and bureaucrats] is motivated by the desire for personal gain or to perpetuate the power of the state or both.
Environmental regulation, workers rights, drilling for oil in Alaska, making up stories about WMDs to invade Iraq, domestic spying are all fruit of the same tree. Don't let them fool you, the good of these things is never the primary goal, and in many cases does not even exist. And "environmental regulation" is a big culprit.
>> The unscientific regulation, and in some countries bans or practical stoppages and embargoes on approvals and research, of nuclear power
Parent comment language isn’t entirely clear, but depending how you interpret it, it can be said that far more harm has been shown, in reality, from nuclear power than from climate change.
But it can not be said that far more harm has been shown, in reality, from nuclear power than from burning coal for electricity. It's actually the opposite.
Six days old, but of course this isn't true. The initiative to block the ascend of electric cars early 20th century to favor fossil interests has been incomparably more destructive.
I'm aware of political parties and politicians who make statements similar to "We have too many regulations" or "stop big government" I'm not aware of opposite.
Prove it.
How's this: if, at some point, it seems to me that your agreement would benefit me or advance something I care about, I promise I'll consider trying to convince you.
Here is a strawman for you: studies for regulation A show that it is successfull in improving habitat for endangered species. Studies also show that the regulation increases tax burden and decreases competitiveness of national agriculture.
Should the regulation be chopped?
I'm not championing any particular set of values here (except, perhaps, that I'm implying the values of doing impartial science and of inclusive, rational public discourse).
I'm saying that public debate ought to be had to litigate that question, and that hard data should feature prominently in that debate. That is not something we'll do if we assume in either direction that "environmental regulation is always good" or "environmental regulation is always bad." I'm saying both kinds exist, and that apart from hard data we can't confidently know one from the other, which means we have to assess and re-assess. I'm not pre-registering an opinion on which side of any particular debate should win, or why I think that instead of the opposite.
Which "other" regulations are harmful and what harm are they doing?
It's like saying that some people are dangerous criminals who need to be locked up, and other people are upstanding citizens who should be free to live their lives. Everybody would agree with this. The disagreement is in how you sort people. What category encompasses someone who belongs to the opposing political party? That sort of thing.
Regulation should definitely be justified by scientific data. Who gets to determine what's enough? Who gets to determine what counts? Leaded gasoline is a great example. It was pretty well understood when it was introduced that lead was hazardous and dumping a bunch of it into the atmosphere was unwise. But this was evaded, denied, and suppressed for decades.
Even today, it's not settled. Lead is still used in aviation gasoline in the US. It's being phased out, but it's been in the process of phasing out for a couple of decades and there seems to be no urgency in it.
You'll find plenty of people disagreeing with pretty clearly beneficial environmental regulations because in their view those regulations are not supported by the data. They would completely agree with your statement, while saying that pollution from coal power plants is no big deal, climate change is a myth, etc.
They just published a draft version of the transition plan here: https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/draft_docs/draft_unleaded_avgas...
The FAA started looking at it 14 years ago. They planned to finish phasing it out in 2023. Three years after that, leaded avgas remains ubiquitous, and there's a plan to finish phasing it out in six years. (The 2030 date excludes Alaska, which is planned for 2032.) That's not what urgency looks like.
They started looking at it 14 years ago, but there's been tons of bureaucratic roadblocks that have impeded progress. (Depending on who you ask, the petroleum companies were responsible for some of these.)
Even today, there are reports that the new unleaded avgas formulations cause engine damage, and we don't entirely know why that's happening. So there's still technical issues to work out. (But it's important, so folks are trying to solve them as quickly as possible.)
All of that stuff could have been overcome a lot faster if there had been motivation to do so. What they should have done is declare, with plenty of advance warning (say, 10 years), that leaded avgas was going to become illegal when leaded car gas became illegal in 1996. If you want to keep flying, figure out how to do it without lead.
The reason it's taking ages is because the FAA just doesn't care that much. The EPA hasn't pushed on it very much. The FAA's priority is minimizing the impact to aviation, not protecting the public from lead pollution, so as long as the EPA doesn't push them, the FAA is content to take things very slow.
Put it on a shorter timeline and solutions would happen faster. Some of those solutions might involve some aircraft being retired due to not being viable in an unleaded world. The FAA doesn't want that, but it should have been done.
Only in the ultralight market they have some newer ones that can run on normal unleaded car gas because regulations are much lighter. In this case I do really think the regulations are holding back innovation and environment.
This would be a reasonable centrist opinion, if there existed environmental regulations that do more harm than good!
Actually, I do know of one, in California, that does both harm and good and the harmful parts need to be reigned in. CEQA in California was expanded by courts after it was passed to cover all sorts of things that weren't intended by the authors. CEQA is not so much an "environmental" law as it is a "perform some massive studies law" as it doesn't really regulate anything in particular.
Mostly it serves as a route to use the courts to delay projects, largely housing in already-built-out areas. By delaying a project's approval with a court lawsuit for 2-3 years, the preliminary financing runs out, the cost of owning land without doing anything with it runs out, so projects can be scuttled without the validity of the lawsuit every being evaluated by courts.
Instead of this sort of legal courtroom process that takes long and indeterminate amounts of time, CEQA should be replaced with strict and very clear definitions of harm, or at least move the more subjective parts into a science-based regulatory body that provides answers an a short timeline that can not be dragged on indefinitely.
> Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights.
This is a very weird turn of the phrase "corporations aren't people," because there actually are highly influential politicians that made the case that corporations are people. Nobody is saying that regulations are people. That's silly.
The regulations we need to get rid of are not "environmental" regulations, they are "rent seeking" regulations that allow entrenched interests to prevent disruption by smaller interests. CEQA is not a problem because its an environmental regulation, it's a problem because it's a tool NIMBYs use to get results that are worse for the environment.
This sounds good as a general default, but there are differences of approach. The US, for example, tends to be more permissive with new chemicals while the EU tends to take a more precautionary approach. Which is better on the whole, weighing the various competing goods, I don't know. I generally favor health over economic prowess, however.
> a manipulative political maneuver
Yes, under the pretext of concern for the environment. There are well-known cases where the political opposition will commission a bogus ecological studies to stifle construction projects they either don't agree with or as a petty way to simply make the ruling party appear less successful. And naturally, the ecological study will find something, as virtually no major construction project will leave the environment unaltered, which is not to say seriously or irretrievable damaged.
You're right. Off the top of my head, the stupidest environmental regulation I can think of right now is the banning of plastic straws. It's such a minuscule amount of plastic used compared to the mountains of bags and packaging used in general commerce and industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting our environment. I just believe in evidence-based policy and setting priorities correctly. After all, money, labor, and attention are finite resources.
Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.
If I'm doing anything (and I'm self-consciously and intentionally doing next to nothing here), it is suggesting or reaffirming an extremely basic rational grid that, in my opinion, ought to apply across all aisles as universal, table-stakes context within which people who disagree with one another can try to reach rational, reality-informed compromise.
If I'm issuing any clarion call, it is this and only this:
Some environmental regulation is good, and some environmental regulation is bad, and we should use science to figure out which is which and then legislate based on the best good-faith interpretation of that science that we have access to.
That's it. Re-read my parent comment, if you don't believe me. That's literally all it says.
The reflexive contrary reaction, in this thread, against what I see as an extremely mild proposal justifies the (frankly quite minimal) effort I made in articulating it. This is not a universally accepted starting point for public policy discourse, though I think it should be (which is why I said so, in so many words).
Rational people, like both you and me I hope, have to voice this perspective and insist upon its acceptance and application if it is to survive the political polarization we're enduring as a society right now.
I think people's health is more important than corporate profits. If corporations played fair, I'd be more tempted to agree with your formulation than with mine, but history has shown that that isn't the case. Take a current example like PFAS, where as soon there is enough evidence to prohibit one variety because it is harmful, the industry just starts using a very similar one that the legislature hasn't had time to collect evidence against.
And, some people think that over-regulation on the insecticide use of DDT (which, to be perfectly fair is a nasty chemical and pretty much confirmed carcinogen, also was having negative effects on birds who were eating the poisoned insects and thereby getting unintended higher doses of the stuff) directly facilitated a rebound in mosquito populations in Africa, downstream from that a rebound in mosquito-borne malaria, and downstream from that a death toll debatably as bad or worse in terms of loss of human life than might've been had DDT use been more controlled and less banned outright.
Or think about how the banning of sulfur from cargo ship fuel in 2020 led to an 80% decrease in SO2 emissions... which is great for cutting harmful pollution around ports and such... But caused a measurable RISE in global temperatures because the sulfate aerosols had been reflecting sunlight off of the atmosphere, delaying global warming.
I don't know man, I don't have all the answers and I'm not trying to shill for mustache-twirlingly evil corporations who would turn us all into Soylent Green if it meant ten basis points more profit this quarter. I am just saying that there's gotta be a balance, and we have to recognize that there's no automatic, turn-your-brain-off safe side to default to. We always need science to verify that what we thought would happen happened, and that nothing we didn't intend to happen did, and in cases where the unforseen second-order effects should cause us to revisit the policy decisions we've made, even if just to revise and improve them rather than completely reverse course, we should actually do that rather than let political momentum override scientific validation and feedback.
You aren't wrong, but let's be honest that a lot of that is manufacturing just moved to China and moved the pollution. Specific to lead in gas, yes it's great we no longer do this.
There's less manufacturing jobs and it's less of the total economy as other sectors grew but it would presumably need to be genuinely cleaner in order to offset that growth if industrial pollution just remained flat.
The switch from coal to gas would be a major cleanup for any process that uses electricity, for example.
"…played a major role in developing leaded gasoline and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons…; both products were later banned from common use due to their harmful impact on human health and the environment. He was granted more than 100 patents over the course of his career."
As someone else said, this guy's work was so toxic to the planet we ought to ban everything else he ever invented—just in case.
(And weirdly, one of his own machines took his life as well—whether by design or not.)
That wedge surrounded by green is a neighborhood that was created by landfilling a patch of swamp and building a levee around it. The northeast side of the wedge is the "nice" part of the neighborhood. You can see the houses are much bigger and there is a golf course running through it. There's a country club and lot of very nice houses. That's where a lot of upper level oil company employees live. (We lived here, my stepfather was a research chemist at DuPont.)
The southwest side of the neighborhood (much of it literally on "the other side of the tracks") is the cheaper houses and some apartments where a lot of blue collar employees work.
Zoom out a bit and you see Shell Norco to the northwest, the very heart of (and cause of) Cancer Alley. Ormond Estates was basically created to be a commuter neighborhood for Shell. Across the river is Dow Chemical. Look east and you see the IMTT St. Rose chemical plant. Keep going upriver and you get to DuPont and the Marathon Refinery.
Most of the executives responsible for cancer here do live in the area. People of all stripes have an impressive ability to maintain cognitive dissonance and live in denial when they are incentivized to do so.
Southern Louisiana is an intense microcosm of this. Seafood is one of the biggest industries there and you would think the local culture would be intensely protective of the environment, especially after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But environmentalism is woven into liberal culture that is in opposition to the religious conservative culture of the area, so it often gets actively rejected even though poor people in Louisiana are the ones who suffer for their choice.
"Strangers in Their Own Land" is an excellent social science book if you want to know more about the area.
In Louisiana after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, people could literally see crude oil washing up on the same shores where they went out to catch redfish and bring it home for dinner.
And yet those same people voted for the exact same politicians that enabled that stuff to happen.
It's not a simple visibility problem. It's a complex cultural issue that relates to the interests of the elites, communication systems, religion, etc.
A big part of why I left Louisiana is because the culture there is so deeply broken that the best solution I could come up with is to escape.
This is fixing the symptom instead of the problems. Elites are allowed to be rich because the cost of failure is supposed to be extremely (historically, their life) expensive to them. We got rid of the latter without the adjusting the former.
I would almost always take the opposite side of this bet. Once responsibility becomes diffuse enough, people would actively poison themselves as they see no alternative.
Is it though? How much lead can you breathe before you totally lose your mind?
And....it worked pretty much exactly as designed - initially only the largest stations carried it because they could justify the storage costs, and eventually it disappeared from almost everywhere. Just before covid there were still 3 small garages selling leaded petrol by the drum, but afaik they all stopped doing so.
And regardless - you can stil buy actual real Tetraethyl Lead fuel additive which turns your petrol into actual real 4-star leaded petrol, just like in the old days:
https://www.demon-tweeks.com/tetraboost-e-guard-15-fuel-addi...
Aviation gasoline is probably the one market that still keeps it afloat, when/if piston aviation switches over the remaining market is small and insignificant.
Sounds like the government is being lax. From the aircraft owners and pilots association:
>So the Government's indifference is not going to help us in the UK if the *supply of leaded AVGAS is stopped, the UK CAA have not appoved new fuels, there is no infrastucture or supply chain in the UK. We keep beating the doors at the CAA and DfT...
Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant:
> TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year:
> They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional.
https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-...
TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now.
New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency.
Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power.
There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.
For anyone wanting a slightly ranty but also informed description of why, I enjoyed this Hank Green video on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBnc...
A quick look at the PJM interconnect data would disagree with you. About a quarter of the live power is coal.
https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx
That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C).
Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.
We shouldn't get rid of coal without having something to replace it (ideally nuclear/solar/wind, but realistically probably gas), but I think the point was just that nobody would build a new coal plant today or keep them running for longer than they need to. They're inefficient and fairly expensive.
In EU 90% of expenses of running coal plants are taxes, yet it can still compete with subsidized green energy! It would be in everybody best interest, to allow building modern coal plants, to replace toxic inefficient stuff from 1960ties.
But with the overregulated and overtaxes industry, we have the worst from all options.
Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube.
But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage.
I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that!
Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?
https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/art...
Total and per capita coal usage for Germany and a few other peer nations:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...
I can see a bump in early 1980s but I see the same in other nations, possibly a response to oil embargoes, possibly just economic growth.
>Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction.
Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha
Well, yes, it isn't subtle.
It turns out that some propaganda is just correct, however.
Strangely enough, I was raised with quite a bit of environmental responsibility, but only a relatively dim awareness of the show existing.
(ETA: Not to mention that the biggest takeaways from such shows was that individual action was sometimes more important than corporate or regulatory action, a message itself designed by the oil companies to avoid responsibility. If there was propaganda in those shows, it may not have been the heroes winning, but the idea that all we need are a few magic heroes rather than government regulations.)
Yes, well the alternative, where the entire media system that might offer a cartoon like Captain Planet is owned by one side, is working out super well and in no way slants anyone's view of anything. Good God, my dad still fights weird battles like this tiny skirmish without ever being able to see the larger picture and how immaterial this is.
When I go to the range, every once in a while, I'll see one of the older marksmen who's there with his squirrel hunting rifle, chambered in .22 LR. I've noticed that he seems to have a tremor in his hands when he's loading his magazines. Essential tremor is linked to lead exposure [0]
Most .22 LR projectiles are either just lead or have a copper "wash" over the lead, not a proper jacket like you see on other rounds.
I wonder, if you shoot those loads for long enough, and breathe in enough gunsmoke, do you get that problem?
As for the proof being in our hair... well, not mine. Chrome dome over here XD
Particularly for unjacketed bullets like 22LR. Even jacketed bullets tend to not be jacketed at the base.
With rounds that aren't well jacketed like those 22s that are just bare lead, you also get some of the round scraping in the barrels that comes off as dust.
There's tons of lead in the air at shooting ranges.
Copper, polymer-coated, or total metal jacket rounds will also result in less lead on the firearm, I'd think, and less on the user's hands. One old guy I know who had lead poisoning at one time believes the real risk is getting the lead on one's hands and then handling a cigarette.
then lead is being sprayed all over you, your car and home, daily
for THREE DECADES NOW
no rush, not like it's poison or does permanent damage to your health/IQ
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
I guess people who have money for personal airplanes also have the money to lobby when it matters for their interests. Pricks, I hope they die of dementia.
California has a few airports that are stocking the lead-free alternatives, but that's about it.
But yes, blame the small aircraft owners if it makes you feel better.
> "piston engine aircraft carry virtually no vital role in anything except people flying them for fun"
I guess we just shouldn't train new pilots then.
And well it's fine by me if you want to literally breathe lead every time you fly, you do you, but who the fuck gives you the right to poison everyone else around you? Like if anyone did what you do they'd justifiably spend their life in prison.
I find it horrid that there is even a debate around lead free alternatives. Oh woe is me, my 80s engine will last 100 hours less! Jesus fucking christ. You sound like a 3M lawyer advocating for PFAS. "The alternatives are inconvenient and expensive so we're gonna keep poisoning everyone until they aren't because we can."
> I guess we just shouldn't train new pilots then.
There are literally countless options man. There's even electrics now, you don't exactly need long range for training and small turboprop jet-a options for long hauls. I know the lead is making it hard to think, but for the sake of people breathing your exhaust please do try.
Not to mention they're frequently used for air ambulance flights, survey work, and law enforcement. The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.
Also, the current proposed plan is to migrate off of leaded gasoline for most of the country by 2030, which is actually quite ambitious given that acceptable alternative fuels didn't exist until literally a few years ago.
Excuses are made because it requires retiring or refitting old aircraft, and people need to be forced to do it. Simple as. I will die on this hill.
> The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.
It is not. You're thinking of lidar.
That's besides the fact that there are genuine certified unleaded alternative fuels for piston aircraft now. Fucking "we oh can't do it" lead apologists smh.
And I mentioned workhorse aircraft for a reason, considering that the Velis Electro has a payload of...172 kilograms. Turboprops (gas turbines in general) are far more expensive and far less fuel efficient at low altitudes than their piston engine counterparts, which is precisely why piston engines still exist.
The fact that alternative fuels now exist for piston engines does not make the blatantly wrong nonsense you've been throwing out any more correct, such as your suggestion that you can "just run" piston engines on Jet-A. That is something that anyone who actually knows anything about internal combustion engines can tell you for free causes regular piston engines to detonate/knock. Your assertion that piston-engine aircraft have virtually no vital role was similarly ignorant.
And that's besides the fact that black-and-white "if you don't agree with whatever half-assed or plainly incorrect crap I say in support of The Cause™ you're an apologist" nonsense lost its efficacy years ago; you might want to find a better soapboxing tactic for 2026.
You can't just run piston engines on jet-a but you can run them on regular high octane from any regular gas station or any of the actual alternatives, my point was you can swap them for small turboprop powerplants and run the plane on jet-a. Afaik reducing knocking is not really the point of avgas either, which I'm sure you know, but vapor lock at high altitudes, which you can easily avoid by... not flying high, which by your own point is the main use case for piston aircraft. I guess we'll just spray lead over everyone instead, cause it's "safer".
You're also legally required to maintain 30-45 minutes of emergency reserve, longer if you're flying IFR.
And again, this isn't even touching on the "long" cross-country flights that are legally required for training.
There's been some trials of battery-powered trainer aircraft. The last I checked, they still don't have enough range to do the "long" cross country that's legally required.
And I assure you it's not because of old aircraft. Some flights schools have fleets of brand new 2025/26 models - all of them still run on leaded avgas.
The findings, which appear in PNAS, underscore the vital role of environmental regulations in protecting public health.
The study notes lead rules are now being weakened by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging move to ease environmental protections.
“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,”But when you do look at the details it doesn't look like the results point to the measured lead coming directly from gasoline itself.
Just as likely if not more so coming from the neighborhood lead smelter that operated over a period of decades where the phaseout probably overlapped from both mineral and gasoline sources, in step with the regulations.
These are rare samples but I wonder if it would be possible to determine how much lead was on the outside of the hairs which could be expected to settle from the atmosphere, compared to within the biological matrix itself which could have been incorporated metabolically?
And in a ubiquitous TEL-using environment, would that form of lead build up more so on the outside of the hairs or the inside?
With or without a lead smelter in the neighborhood?
The thing is - it's simply not as good. The worst case is probably frying frozen gyoza. They will get stuck when they get gelatinous on that 'ceramic' surface.
I ended up looking up some slightly offbrand stores to get the pan that I wanted.
I still like non-stick pans for eggs, but for almost everything else, I prefer stainless steel, cast iron, or enameled cast iron. You do have to pay a little more attention to technique (knowing what temperature to heat the pan to before you put food on, etc.), but the end result is just about as good as a non-stick pan with many advantages:
* You don't have to be obsessive about never letting a metal utensil scratch the pan. (I hope you aren't using a metal spatula or fork with your non-stick!)
* You can scrape the hell out of the pan while you cook and get all that delicious crispy fond into what you're making. If I'm doing a pan sauce, it's always in the Dutch oven so I can get that fond into the gravy.
* They last a lot longer. Even if you are careful, a non-stick pan will lose its coating and need to be replaced after a handful of years. I got my cast iron skillet for $15 at an antique store. It's older than me and will outlive me.
* You're not, you know, eating forever chemicals.
This ceramic pan I bought from IKEA lasted like 3-5 months until I was unhappy with it. Historically, the teflon pans I have bought from there have lasted 12-18 months easily.
* I don't know how old my cast iron skillet is because I literally bought it from an antique store but I've had it for over a decade and it's in better shape than ever.
* My $60 Lodge Dutch oven is over a decade old and has been used hundreds of times.
* My stainless steel All-Clad skillet is relatively new at 5-6 years but is no worse than the day I got it.
I think my main complaint is with e.g. IKEA changing their default frying pan coating dramatically without clear communication.
* Tables are fine if you like them
* Some readers won't like them
* But the ones who do will like your real writing style
:)
Teflon and it's relatives--so long as you don't expose them to enough heat to mess with the C-F bonds, they're probably safe. But Teflon only exists as a solid, it will decompose before melting, thus the problem becomes how to form it? You need a solvent--a solvent that dissolves that which is famous for being impervious. To date only one such solvent has ever been found: it's pretty close chemically but one bond doesn't have a F stuck on it so it will play nice with both Teflon (which is what most of the molecule looks like) and other things (the piece that isn't like Teflon.) Can you hope to recover all of the solvent from the finished product? No way. And that solvent will react in the body, it's not inert like the Teflon. Toxic down to the detection threshold.
They have played games, producing "different" solvents but they're all the same thing, the same reactive part connected to a chain of a different length that is fully fluorinated. The length of the inert chain doesn't change anything, the toxicity comes from the one reactive part.
Definitively interesting that they could get so many old hair samples with good provenance.
I have a lot of respect for LDS genealogy efforts. It clearly goes beyond the baptizing the dead thing. Many of them take it very seriously, and they don't shy away from things that challenge the Mormon narratives (mainly DNA evidence not giving support for their peculiar American settlement theories).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sugar-of-lead-a-...
https://petroleumservicecompany.com/sunoco-supreme-112-octan...
I think they only sell the unleaded race gas at the pumps now but I may be wrong.
https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-sha...
Blind doubting of things can be as bad as blindly believing they're safe, if we don't know who's, or if anyone is keeping the safety honest. Capitalism can too often lean towards optimizing profit.
Testing for lead, etc can be done independently pretty easily and consistently enough to get a statistically high enough correlation of what's going on.
I get the stereotypes - but consuming anything in an unbalanced way will lead to being out of balance. Food, caffiene, alcohol, supplements.
Nor is there any need for such a study as we have a natural one: some areas have more fluorine in the water than others. We started putting fluorine in the water because we noticed that the places with higher natural levels had better teeth. There comes a point where it's too much and downsides appear, but, again, we already knew that. Note that this is a completely normal thing--there is nothing which is not toxic in sufficient quantity. Including *everything* that is necessary for human life. What would be strange is if there wasn't some maximum safe level. Some things the body easily eliminates and the range between minimum and maximum is quite wide. Things which are not so easily eliminated have narrower ranges. Thus we have the situation where overdose of water-soluble vitamins is basically unheard-of, but overdose of fat-soluble vitamins very definitely happens.
don't really know what takeaway I'm supposed to know about
If that’s even what their comment was about
How does that effect work?
your assumption wasn’t a “lead free” response, am I doing it right?
Obviously there is an absolutely massive problem that you're missing as you're congratulating yourself on "succeeding" with a massive effort with no clear result.