Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

smithsonianmag.com

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The major proponent was also known as

Thomas Midgley Jr.: Accidentally The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived[0]

Leaded gas, CFCs, and accidentally created a machine that ended his own existence.[1]

[0]https://allthatsinteresting.com/thomas-midgley-jr [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

> Accidentally

Based on the OP, it wasn't at all accidental. They knew it was dangerous and chose it because they could make more money than with safer alternatives such as ethanol.

I don't think he really appreciated the danger of lead. Its acute toxicity was well-known, but not its chronic toxicity.

And plenty of stuff is toxic in large quantities but harmless (or even vital!) in small quantities.

Interesting - what is that based on?

He's not some incidental commentator. He's an engineer and a principle force behind this technology. He is responsible for the outcomes - 'I didn't know' is reckless negligence. And if there were clear acute problems, chronic problems weren't hard to guess at for anyone, much less an engineer, with all those resources, working on it for years.

> engineer and a principle force behind this technology

well he's not some biochemist...

and even biochemists have trouble within their own field because there's so much 'unknown' stuff in biochem (eg Thalidomide scandal)

Then you don't know anything about the man. He intentionally inhaled large quantities of leaded gas to prove it was safe to on lockers.

He would then spend months in Florida recovering from lead poisoning.

He knew, and he didn't care.

Yeah, that kinda reinforces it. He knew about the acute effects, but not about cumulative damage.

I don't think that cumulative toxicity started entering the public mindset until well into the middle of the century.

He's not 'the public' but a highly educated and experienced leading expert in the subject. You have no idea what he knew (afaict) and even if the chronic problems were indeed unknown to him, anyone, even a member of 'the public', could infer that the acute problems certainly risked long-term problems

I had one purple link on that second Wikipedia page, which (macabre as it sounds) was very interesting to read through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...

Also leads to another great list-of-lists; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unusual_deaths

Even more macabre (I should not admit to this publically...): I can't help but find this one (from your first link) quite... hilarious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reichelt.ogv

Elaborate contraption, jumps, falls like a stone, is dead. The end.

Imaginary person: "But he had balls and believed in his own theories."

Me: "Ehm but... how difficult would it have been to throw a wooden puppet instead... or run scaled down experiments first,... than to just immediately jump..."

And Edit: He did run dummy experiments and they clearly showed he shouldn't have jumped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Experiments

Edit 2: That article is very interesting, regarding the jump: "Initial reports speculated on Reichelt's state of mind: none assumed he had been suicidal, but many called him discombobulated in the brain. [...] interview with one of his friends, who claimed that the tailor had felt pressured into giving a dramatic demonstration to attract sponsors, without whom he could not expect to make a profit before any patent expired." (So human nature at play. Financial pressure, wanting to will something to work, guts in the wrong places. An heroic last ditch stunt, combined with a not quite sane state of mind)

There just are so many unfortunate deaths, that one feels so preventable as well. I also have to admit to liking the ending of the Wikipedia image description a lot:

> [...] Police and others crowd around the body of Reichelt as it is carried away. They then measure the depth of the hole in the frozen ground made by his fall (15 cm).

At least they got something out of it I suppose :)

> The Most Dangerous Man Who Ever Lived

The titles like annoy me to no end.

Because Thomas Midgley was an engineer. Not overlord of General Motors. Not director. Not even a large shaholder.

GM Leadership knew effects of TEL. And for decades traded everyone's health for their profits. Midgley is complicit, but he's just a small piece.

People who absolve engineers of all responsibility annoy me to no end. They're omnipresent on this forum and justify working for Facebook with things like "not my decision" or "someone else would do it" or "it's not that bad you just don't understand" or "I'm just following orders"

People who say annoy me to no end annoy me no end. They’re different phrases.

That's ironic, because the "no end" form was already a relatively new idiom. But "to no end" has already overtaken it in terms of popularity. Of course I meant the word "ironic" like I mean the word "literally"; which is to say, figuratively.

Being a prescriptivist creates no end of everyday pains. Language just won't conform.

The thing is that it’s always used in “annoy” or “frustrate” because they mistake the response as sympathetic annoyance or empathic frustration when it’s really just their misuse of language. I don’t want them to be responsible for their miscommunication in the future!

They are not different phrases. "Annoy to no end" is the American English version while "annoy no end" is the British. Both are acceptable and mean the same thing.

Good thing I didn't absolve him of "all responsibility" and even wrote explicitly that he is complicit.

There is an important subtlety which is that engineers are not responsible for which technical challenges get solved, they are responsible for how those technical challenges are solved. An engineer's ethical obligation is not to avoid working on something that could be used in a harmful way, it is to prevent incidental harm from its deliberate usage. There's nothing unethical about working on a fuel additive to prevent engine knock; knowingly using a poisonous compound which is going to create immense public health problems to solve the problem was the sin.

> Midgley is complicit, but he's just a small piece.

Midgley used to tour around “proving” the safety of leaded gas by pouring it on his hands. And had to be treated twice for lead poisoning.

He was very much a culprit.

He washed his hands with leaded gasoline on national television to show it was safe. It was not safe. He lied and suppressed the science. Even if other people lied he was the public face of the lie.

Are we going to measure things by who got most sick or by who got the most out of it? Because if Midgley gets sick and his boss who knows everything gets a million dollars, I will blame his boss more.

For example Charles Kettering (essentially boss of Midgley) was Director of Research for 27 years at GM. Was large shareholder of GM. And he hired Robert Arthur Kehoe to prove that TEL is safe. And Kehoe did. The "proof" was that "you didn't definitively prove that TEL is unsafe, so it's okay".

Btw Kehoe is also the one who certified that Freon is safe.

people like him exist today. people who will do things the scientific community knows is dangerous for pay. Due to a lack of morals or intellect required to understand rammifications is unknown.

Midgley didnt invent most if any of what was packaged up and commodified, he just appropriated research at the time into products without a care in the world. its for that reason that me and many other scientists simply dont publish some results anymore.

The mind it takes to discover and formalize a thing, will understand its problems. The mind it takes to commodify something once formalized, can be many steps down, and so, is unlikely to be capable of seeing the problem.

Therefore, anything which can cause serious issues wont be released. why? because even if we as the inventors go against the profit narrative, we'll be destroyed. people only listen when there's money to be made, but when we say "ok, that's eboygh fossil fuels, we need to slow down" funding gets cut, reputation and character gets attacked, and you largly get deplatformed.

Also the subject of a very entertaining episode of Citation Needed.

I was in Dayton Ohio to see the Wright brothers stuff. There were sidewalk plaques for inventors and celebrities who lived in the city, and they had one for Thomas Midgley Jr. I was shocked!

Fun fact: during their time Dayton had the most patents per capita of anywhere in the US.

I liked the comment someone made some months back when Thomas Midgley Jr. came up on HN: best to ban everything the guy ever invented just to be safe.

There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.

I've heard arsenic also being one of the elements with similar issues

What does lead have to give those properties?

Lucas Reilly's Mental Floss article on Clair Patterson https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... is a much better piece. I'll also recycle https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo 's old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 on this article from its 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 (again, what follows is his or her work not mine!):

> Two beliefs became entrenched:

1. that lead is natural to the human body, and

2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed

Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]

A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.

Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again...

[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...

> countries where leaded gasoline was—or still is—used

Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021

…but is exhausting at volume from most small aircraft you see. I say sadly, as an aviation geek; we can do better!

We're working on it, slowly but surely. This has been a known problem for a long time, at least since 2009 if not earlier. GAMI's G100UL was approved as a 100LL replacement in 2022, but there is still some controversy.

Avweb has done a good series of videos on this. There were some real engineering concerns and some typical aviation conservative decision making. But really, it's a tragedy of the FAA fumbling the ball for decades at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F-WngVMJBQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvse4Xhzwuk

https://avweb.com/features/unleaded-avgas-airport-playbook-l...

https://avweb.com/aviation-news/judge-denies-g100ul-motion/

https://g100ul.com/

A better way would be to switch to mogas and authorize cheap fuel system retrofits and maybe mandate dual FADECs on engines similar to the ADS B requirements. Your modern general aviation pistons can easily handle mogas.

An even better way would been to encourage the migration to turbines and deprecate pistons entirely. Jet A (diesel) for the win.

The new turbotechs regenerative turbines are a lot more reliable (3000 hours TBO).

https://cubcrafters.com/c/2026/07/press-release-cubcrafters-...

Pistons suffer from too many reliability issues (especially if you don't have a MX team on call like a commerical operation).

I am not sure why the aviation industry (and the FAA in particular) is obsessed with keeping around almost-a-century old lawnmower engines (Yes your Cessna Skyhawks, if you trace them back to their predecessor, are from the WWII days). Learning to "lean an engine" never made me a better pilot and there's a reason FADECs are used everywhere else.

It's a very big problem because most of the big general aviation players (Cirrus, Diamond, Continental, a bunch of others) are snapped up by Chinese conglomerates (they don't have general aviation in Asia but they have a growing number of flight schools, not sure how that works) now and they are hardly known for their expertise in piston engines. People buy Chinese EVs, nobody buys Chinese ICE cars. Diamond owners had to ground their planes for over 2 years because Diamond couldn't figure out how to do a Mercedes OEM license-built piston head properly. The Chinese-built pistons kept cracking and required boroscope engine inspections every 50 hours (notoriously expensive and not covered by warranty, they only managed to solve the cracking problem recently). So much for supposed Chinese manufacturing prowness.

Imagine buying a fancy Porsche car and only to be told that you have to keep it in the garage most of the year because the car company got bought out and the new owners don't know how to produce a proper piston. Owners would riot. Sadly general aviation operators are trained to take it up the ass like a good little pilot because the dinosaur FAA (for whom general aviation is their lowest priority, about the same importance as hot air balloons) mandated that the OEM's word is literal law and if it's grounded then too bad.

As I understand it, a big part of the problem is that the general aviation market is too small to justify the expense of getting new designs certified. Also, it seems baked into the regulations that the old design was "good enough", so it still is today, even though technology has moved on.

When people are building experimental class piston airplanes with better features, reliability, and performance than the certified world can muster at half the price, you know something has gone wrong.

I believe liability is an issue too. In aviation (as compared with autos) the manufacturer is often found partially liable for an accident, so they can be on the hook even if it was mostly the fault of the operator.

It's worse now, people are doing "51% Build Assists" (most famously Vans and Sling aircraft) to save money where the factory would give you an IKEA plane kit and you will maybe put in a few screws and decals and install the avionics panel and you will sit in the room and watch them assemble the rest of the plane "under your supervision". Then the whole thing will get penciled whipped as an Experimental Owner-Built aircraft and if anything goes wrong it's entirely the fault of the owner and not the factory, because the layman hundred hour PPL pilot is supposed to be a master of aerospace engineering.

I think MOSAIC is the only thing the FAA got right in the recent years when it comes to general aviation.

Isn’t it better?

Some people dont want to pay the extra overhead and cost burden of the manufacturer taking partial liablity. They’re willing to take a risk.

The way I see it is that it's a structural failure of the licensing system and the FAA. Imagine after a few high profile celebrity car crashes, the Feds decided that new car designs after a certain year carries manufacturer liability and everything before has no liability. If you want a car at a reasonable price, you have to go assemble your own from pre fabbed parts. It forces the industry to become all-or-nothing with no reasonable room for nuance or debate. That's basically lazy lawmaking. The powers that be are hoping that general aviation as a category goes away completely. (And the useless AOPA is complacent, support EAA folks)

And yet, because these experimental owner-built aircraft are free from many of the burdensome certification requirements, they're also free to use newer and better tech at a lower cost.

Who is safer? The person who "self-built" (but actually allowed the trained factory folks to build) a Kitfox with a full glass cockpit, modern engine, and dual FADEC, or the person who buys a 1972 Cessna Skyhawk with steam gauges?

I actually hope the turbotech holds up under actual use. I'd love to toss my IO-550Cs for Jet-A.

Ah, a Skywagon enjoyer?

:) Baron. some 300hp effective little turbines with non-ridiculous fuel burn would be a "shut up and take my money" moment for me.

I would prefer a twin high wing with the existing TP-R90s. Unfortunately manufacturers don't like dual high wings :/

That Eggenfellner dude on zuckbook has been spamming a continuous stream of his dream twin highwing and it looks nice. I hate his spam but love his mockups, I want it to be more than a paper airplane so badly. :)

There's an equal and opposite person who'll be screeching about safety if you try and monkey with the fuel.

That's exactly why this is taking so long. There's no free lunch.

> an equal and opposite person who'll be screeching about safety

Unleaded avgas isn't as standardized as 100LL. (To my knowledge, there is no dying convention for its different octane ratings. So you can't draw fuel and confirm, visually, that someone didn't put something in your tanks that's going to knock your engine.)

Gas itself is poison. Just take a deep huff at the gas station. EVs are the only way to go. At least the pollution is localized, not down every inner city street with exhaust and other vapors.

Maybe you can enlighten me.

My question that once you mined the materials for the car + battery, shipped that somewhere to be built, then shipped that to be sold.

Then you have the added waste battery once it not longer hold enough charge. Is it actually better for the environment?

If we add all this extra pull on the grid we need to generate the power for that too.

Is this a real question? ICE cars have a battery too.

Evs have a main battery and a car battery so they ice and ev are equivalent in that respect.

Sure Is! I’m largely uninformed on the topic. Asking questions even stupid ones means you get to not be stupid after.

Yeah it's actually better and it's not even close, provided that the cars make more than 50k km.

Petrol engines have terrible efficiency and that's also what makes the petrol numbers so bad.

If "it's not even close" at 50k km, then surely the break even is much lower and you could've just said that?

That's because 50k km is pretty much nothing for a brand new car and if it breaks before that, it was badly designed to start with.

Batteries fortunately do not destroy the raw materials they are made from. So eventually we can stop mining new raw materials once we have built enough batteries. In addition, batteries for cars live a surprising long time - and can be used to stabilize the grid once they diminish in oomf (technical term).

The fact that we're throwing them into the garbage in the form of disposable vapes doesn't give me hope for the future tho.

I'd be happy if people threw them in garbage, but I often see them tossed on the street. Sickens me to see

Sodium-ion batteries are now also finally coming to market (CATL Naxtra) [1]. This gives me a lot of hope for the future.

[1]: https://www.electrive.com/2026/06/26/catl-targets-up-to-2000...

This is a very stale set of talking points.

Uninformed maybe, I’ve not looked into it as Evs not high my list of things to read about hence the questions that came to mind.

Lithium batteries can be recycled really well. That's why there's so much effort going into tracking them. So they don't end up in a landfill.

That’s good to know. This was one of my thoughts.

If the evs end up generating a tonne of material that we can’t do anything with that would be a short term gain.

Yes and the good thing is, the lithium can be mostly recovered and that mean it doesn't have to be mined again for the next car. Lithium mining is a messy polluting process so that's really good.

It can be done, e.g.: https://batterycouncil.org/battery-facts-and-applications/ho...

That's about lead batteries, totally different game

Yes, electric cars are better for the environment over their entire lifespan. And yes clean energy will be needed to power them.

ICE's are actually shockingly bad at efficiently converting fossil fuel into movement. They mostly produce waste heat and exhaust gasses.

and still sprayed all around the surrounding land at almost every airport in the USA and worldwide from prop aircraft exhaust despite knowing ANY amount is toxic and irreversible for 30+ years

* https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

You say that in the past tense... But pretty much every propeller plane worldwide still uses the stuff...

Only in piston engines, which are a minority of propeller planes. Most commercial propeller aircraft are turboprops, and they use jet fuel. And diesel engines are slowly taking over from gasoline in piston engines.

Correct. For others reading this though: virtually all piston-engine GA aircraft in the US today are still burning 100LL (leaded), and there are nearly 200,000 of them actively flying.

There is a timeline to transition to UL, but very low collective confidence it'll happen by the 2030 goal.

edit: to the commenter that fired off the reactionary reply and deleted it before I could help you. No, not because "[rich people] won't do the right thing." It's because lead is an anti-knock additive for piston engines, and a safe replacement has to go through unimaginable amounts of testing. Once it's certified, one must still figure out scaling production, distribution, etc. Aviation is a very slow moving industry and regulatory environment, which I'm personally thankful for.

PDF (77pgs): https://download.aopa.org/advocacy/2026/2026-01_Draft-Unlead...

the amount of lead that is acceptable is ZERO

ZERO, thirty years ago when there was definitive proof is it forever and irreversible

all lead exhaust aircraft should have been phased out a decade ago if not two decades ago if they cannot be converted

again, there is no acceptable amount, imagine it being sprayed on you, your car, everywhere

your body tries to process it like calcium and stores it forever

how much damage and disease to you and your family are you willing to accept just so someone can keep using their prop aircraft for another decade to make profit?

yes it's all about the money, it's pretty obvious, if there wasn't profit involved it would have been phased out with cars THIRTY YEARS ago

all that lead sprayed all around the land and on people is FOREVER, it doesn't go away, it doesn't wash away, it doesn't evaporate

I'm unclear who you're arguing with. I don't fly GA and I live under the approach to a GA airport, which is why I'm well-read on this subject.

personally i think we should just stop selling the leaded version, tomorrow. alternatives exist, update your planes or dont fly, but no more leaded fuel.

It's mind boggling that people will screech about how the professionals say zero but then turn around and act like GA is a big deal, despite the fact that the same professionals will say that unless you have occupational exposure other vectors are going to be what dominate your lead level.

And by "mind boggling" I just mean a more polite way to say "condemnation of people's logic and reasoning abilities or honesty"

Yeah, sure we should get rid of GA leaded gas and we're working on it but it's not really a front burner priority because of how little it gets into people.

You say that like it is a fact.

The acceptable amount of lead is non-zero, just like the acceptable level of deaths are non-zero.

The amount of lead I am willing to expose my family to so that prop planes can keep flying is also non-zero.

That doesnt mean progress cant be made on the issue.

Very true that only recently, a lead-free substitute was available.

https://g100ul.com/

Also UL94 (https://www.swiftfuelsavgas.com/) could be used in many models. Unfortunately some have been previously upgraded to high-compression engines to get a few more horsepower and they can't use UL94.

Some can run on ethanol-free 87-octane automotive fuel, generally the low-compression engines that already can run 80/87 aviation fuel.

80/87 and 100/130 leaded fuels are all but unavailable, but 100LL is ubiquitous. There is a chicken and egg problem to make G100UL and UL94 available, which will encourage its use. Even automotive fuel is hard to find at airports, possibly because they don't want the liability of improper fueling. (100LL is compatible with almost every gasoline aircraft engine, the rest are not.)

The G100UL also may have an issue with being too good of a solvent, although the developer insists that's a libel.

Swift Fuels is also supposed to introduce a different type of 100-octane unleaded called 100R that has had good results in testing but hasn't been broadly approved yet.

It was like pulling teeth from a dragon to get the FAA to move forward with G100UL as I understand it, and then they suddenly approved it for just about anything provided they write a supplemental type certificate. So maybe the same will happen when/if 100R is approved and someone will handle the marketing.

I vaguely remember amounts of lead exposure and IQ (as in lower) could be linked quite well and there was a map showing that for the US.

Trying to find it I stumbled upon this https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119 -> "The average lead-linked loss in cognitive ability was 2.6 IQ points per person as of 2015." Quite insane to think about. Obviously that's more than merely leaded gasoline though.

Regarding the map, not what I was looking for, but https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/... from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02735-x is interesting.

Still an ongoing issue, interesting article, some insane metrics in that image though. Lower image is showing `relative IQ cost` for children 0-9 years of age as of 2019,... as in `estimated loss of earning due to less IQ`, boy oh boy, let that sink in: Starting with incomplete exposure data, estimating the resulting IQ loss, then translating that into lifetime earnings (projected somehow into the future economy)...

25 years ago in the UK, leaded petrol was being phased out but still pretty common. The UK Government was giving people grants to have existing cars converted to run on LPG, so they'd only run on a coke can of petrol for a minute or so on startup then switch over to gas.

Catalytic converters? Don't need 'em! There's no CO or unburnt fuel in the exhaust to catalyse because they run as lean as a vegan's dog!

CO2 emissions? Sure, but the stuff is getting flared off as waste at refineries anyway, and we're not going to stop making plastics and fertilisers any time soon, so may as well extract useful work from burning it!

We could have had incredibly clean cities everywhere by now, by simply keeping older cars on the road and adapting them to run on much cleaner safer fuel.

But there was a problem, an absolute bombshell of a problem. The fatal flaw that killed LPG as a road fuel.

It didn't sell new cars. It didn't sell anyone any debt.

So they came up with "scrappage schemes" where you'd get a couple of hundred quid for your old car, it would get destroyed, and then all you had to do was buy a nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel car instead, at some swingeing rate of interest (expect to pay well over twice the sticker price by the end of it - and no, you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package).

And you see how well that worked out.

LPG had the same problem as electric cars. In the early years there was no infrastructure and so if you buy one you're an early adopter and you can't actually go anywhere. It took a while to get that infrastructure and now electric cars are useful for most trips. You can use LPG cars to go for most trips in the US even today. However, you better plan ahead because finding a place of fuel is going to require some effort. I had a few LNG stations near me, but they seem to have all been torn out, meaning that never made it.

Gas cars faced the same thing when they first came out but by the time they became used for longer trips there was gas everywhere and in the meantime there was gas at least where you bought the car and so it was good enough for the short trips that bought it for.

That was kind of it. Until maybe five years ago, every branch of Morrison's had two LPG pumps at their petrol stations, as did Asda.

Now it's mostly wholesale fuel suppliers that have pumps.

LPG was really popular in Holland, that wasn't the problem. You could get it everywhere. It was cheap too.

There were just some artificial issues:

- The government didn't want LPG owners to be cheaper off (it was much cheaper per kilometer) so they raised road tax substantially making it only economical if you drove a lot

- There were no cars running on LPG off factory. You always had to deal with an aftermarket install with a big tank that took up half your trunk. It didn't replace the original tank because that was needed for starting, though part of it could have been replaced by LPG storage. After all you didn't need 80 litres of it. They didn't do that however. Some cars had donut tanks installed (for the LPG) that fit in the spare wheel space but they were tiny and you had to fill up constantly.

- Engine performance was significantly reduced on LPG.

- The tanks were pressurised which were a bit dangerous and didn't store a lot of mileage for the space. You couldn't fill them up 100% either. High pressure vessels and high energy collisions don't go well together. You can design around that but because the only options were aftermarket the cars were never designed with this in mind.

- After fuelling the hose was pressurised and when you released it it blew a whole bunch of gas in your face. Yuck. I used to kick the release lever from a distance but it didn't really help.

We had one for a while but it was kinda a clumsy affair. Lack of places to fill up was however not a problem at all. Despite all the artificially created barriers it was still a common choice for the high mileage driver in the 90s and early 2000s.

I don't think it's really a thing anymore. EVs have taken over this space. It was never a great solution anyway as it's still a fossil fuel causing CO2 release. It was never really going to be a permanent solution.

Engine performance is actually increased on LPG if you do it properly. It's less energy dense, so you use more of it, but you get a bigger slower bang, giving you more torque. You need the timing a bit different.

The tanks are far safer than the leaky plastic yoghurt pots that people carry petrol around in under their cars. They can't explode, they can't be ripped open, they can't even be dented. I have attempted to knock a hole in one with a 16-tonne excavator and only succeeded in squashing it a little bit. I've taken LPG tanks out of burnt-out taxis that were still half-full.

They're not even under any pressure, they're at 8 bar or so. The main danger if the gas gets out is that it's really really cold!

It's still a fossil fuel causing CO2 release but it's a fossil fuel that would just be burnt in a flare stack if you didn't burn it in a car. No-one is going to stop making propane, as long as we make plastics and fertilisers.

LPG and CNG had a consistent niche, but they weren't transformative and ended up not being significantly cheaper either. And recently we saw the problem with natural gas supply availability.

With EVs, all of this goes away and you can charge at home, including off your own solar panels. The technology has finally got to a tipping point, thanks to a couple of decades of phone batteries.

> you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package

[Citation needed] .. but yeah the scrappage schemes (various) were of dubious value and something of a bung to the motor industry and to quieten opposition to things like the LEZ.

Even down south here at 56°N I'd need a set of solar panels about 100m x 100m to charge even a very small car in less than a day.

A good Veritasium video on the subject:

https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?is=MorITIg_MvFrKtvR

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 - Sept 2021 (399 comments)

`Discussed at the time` and here I expected a link to a HN thread from the 1920s!

But yes, `(of the article)`, guess my reaction was anticipated :)

Yep we've been around the block a few times with that pre-emptive trick: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Same with cigarettes and asbestos. Everyone knew smokers had shorter lives, but the facts were suppressed because it was inconvenient. Everyone knew asbestos was dangerous, but they put it in every single house for decades because "fire was worse".

And don't even get me started on DDT and teflon.

Cigarette smoking really got going in the world wars, I understand, especially ww2 when the world had manufacturers serving the effort. The custom is dying with the veterans as everyone knows they have a hall pass for it but the rest of us don’t. So smoking was a shorter life but that hardly matters when you’re deployed in theater.

> The custom is dying with the veterans

You might want to update your knowledge.

As of 2024, the cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults is 9.9%, which is an all-time low.

Asbestos gets a bit of a bad rap. There's an enormous difference from e.g. asbestos tiles and siding in a house vs loose clumps of insulation at mass scale in large factories and such.

But at some point people decided that any asbestos was an immediate ticket to mesothelioma and had to eradicate it altogether.

I guess some forms of asbestos are fine to use in residential development.. as long as houses never burn or get damaged in earthquakes or suffer flood damage or need extensive renovations.. and as long as we do not care about some unimportant landscapes and river systems in (ideally, canada or russia or something of the sort) and all of its current and future inhabitants.

Even then, it's overblown. The fibers embedded in the cement siding that was common for a while as an example, that's just never going to be friable to a degree that matters. Not to mention the issue is really more of a long term exposure thing. You'd need to be quite an unlucky person to take one whiff of some asbestos fibers and get mesothelioma decades later.

It's perfectly safe to sit in a room full of asbestos insulation like it is to sit in front of any computer from the 90s (leaded solder) but it's still good to ban asbestos just like it was probably good to switch to RoHS solder.

Asbestos in safe forms does not become dangerous from fire or earthquake or flood damage.

It does becomes dangerous from badly done demolition work. And they are harmful to the people mining and manufacturing them.

But for a long while, almost every material was extremely harmful for the people mining and manufacturing them. It really took a while to determine that asbestos is actually worse than fiberglass or gypsum.

We've known about climate change for more than a century, but we're pigs, we don't care.

I think it’s important not to use the “we” word here.

1) Many people know and care. 2) some people lie for profit 3) other people are willfully ignorant and allow the liars keep at it because it’s more convenient.

And even among those who know and care there’s different amounts people are willing to do about it. I imagine you (who theoretically know and care) still drive, fly, use plastic, Eat foods grown with petroleum based fertilizers, buy products shipped long distances with petroleum. (As do I)

The key is to go after the liars so we can set sane policies based on findings of fact pursued in good faith.

I think this is a good summary for politics generally

"We" live in a democracy and our leaders are chosen by "us". You don't get to pick and choose. You are your government assuming you're from any western democracy.

The planet is becoming inhospitable for humans and honestly likely for the best. At least some folks will get rich out of it.

For an animated version of this story, see Cosmos, season 2 (I forget which episode, but it was helpful in teaching about this in high school)

https://www.space.com/25579-cosmos-recap-earth-age-lead-pois...

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

Some previous discussion:

2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

Yes and the toxic effects of asbestos had been known for thousands of years before popcorn ceilings became a fad

Switzerland banned in in 1926, the Soviet Union in major cities in the 50s. Everyone knows lead is deadly, but so is going outside. Policy makers have to weight the risks of velocity now vs crashing later.

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA

> This, my dear friend, is all I can at present recollect on the Subject. You will see by it, that the Opinion of this mischievous Effect from Lead, is at least above Sixty Years old; and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv'd and practis'd on.

> Benjamin Franklin, 1786

Elon might take the lead with his destruction of US aid. I heard an estimate that millions of unnecessary deaths may come of it.

Will anyone be held accountable though?

Betteridge's law here

The guy that invented spent years bed-ridden because of it... yet he still went to trade shows to show it off

And he also invented CFCs

He was bedridden because of Polio.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872443

Anytime Thomas Midgley Jr. pops up, I take the opportunity to re-listen to his episode on the Memory Palace. Wonderful bit of historical biography: https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/

“What don’t kill you makes you more strong”.

Genuinely trying to help - one would generally phrase this as "... makes you stronger".

It’s a direct quote. But you mean well.

Well damn I'm sorry now I'm curious - a direct quote from what?

From a song, spelling is different but it does end with “makes you more strong”. Looks for broken, beaten, scared.

Nietzsche wrote 'was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärk', don't worry about what that other robot is posting.

You being the other other robot?

People like to point and laugh at the Romans at their use of lead in plumbing and wine. But they were never even close to being as stupid and callous as we managed to be the last 150 years. They are going to be shaking their head at us for thousands of year hopefully.

Why is this surfacing up?

hmm good question.

  Ah. We can't patent XYZ let's use ABC.

Such sociopathic thinking.

i'm fairly certain the reason trump was elected is the long tail of leaded gasoline; the timing fits pretty well.

Why did these same people vote differently earlier? Does the effect of leaded gasoline show up later in life?

And does not explain all the young men voting for him.

They didn’t vote differently. There were a larger number of the greatest generation that were more comfortable with shared sacrifice in service of society and less entitled like the baby boomers are.

now let's dig up some old timey polls and see how the greatest generation felt about the issues you hold dear :)

Read charitably, OP isn’t decrying a disagreement on issues as much as the willingness to burn everything down just to see someone else hurt more than oneself. This is present on the left. But it’s uniquely politically actualised by MAGA. (The Democratic Socialists winning elections aren’t seeking to overturn elections or violently storm governing bodies.)

The greatest generation has been <5% of population since like 05'. baby boomers were 30+% and probably higher for voters.

Yes, the psychological effects of environmental lead last a lifetime. No, they didn’t vote differently, they have always gravitated to actors that promise simple solutions and highlight bad blood and animus.

It doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to weaken a strong country to the point where a reality show buffoon can become president.

there's no "same people"; leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80's but wasn't finished until around 2000s.

The elderly are simply more engaged and that's what happened.

Calling my airplane a MAGA airplane is a good way to get my wife to argue for a boat instead. :)

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