Thursday, January 12, 2023

Leaded Gas

Back when I was a kid, you could still buy leaded gas for your car. 

The additive TEL (tetraethyl lead) helped extend the life of cars, a very important thing for working class Americans, and also improved mileage, making the car run more efficiently. True, the lead then escaped into the environment, damaging the brains and nervous systems of children and adults, leading to lower IQs and problems with impulse control. This effect was especially severe in children. (See here for more.)

Lead was finally phased out in the US in the early 1990s, but remains concentrated in soils near roadways, especially in cities, which saw a lot of automobile traffic. 

During the time this ban was being debated, there were -- you will not be surprised to find -- a number of people, especially conservatives, who insisted that poisoning our population with lead was no big deal, and that the benefits of leaded gas very much outweighed the damage done to people they didn't even know or care about. Plus, producing and distributing TEL was a lucrative business. Why did these ridiculous social reformers hate capitalism so much?

Since TEL was banned, crime rates have plummeted and US IQ levels have inched higher. This is especially true of violent crime levels. (Here's the Wikipedia version of these events.) Also, ways have been found to extend the life of automobiles and improve their efficiency without also poisoning the population. Win-win, wouldn't you say?

Well, some reports have surfaced that show gas stoves and gas heating can cause problems with indoor air, and that can increase the risk of diseases such as asthma, especially in children raised in a home with gas stoves. Refusing to learn from history, today's conservatives are throwing a giant temper tantrum. You can pry their gas stoves out of their cold, dead hands, and so on.

Disclosure: Our house has both gas heating and a gas stove. I love my gas stove. It is so much better for cooking than one with electric hobs. I also love sitting in front of a gas fire. My favorite part about the duplex I rented in graduate school was that it had these little gas fires installed in the walls of every room, including the bathroom, so that you could warm your rooms by these cheery blue flames.

But if these stoves and these heating systems are harming children, not to mention me, then hell yeah, we should phase them out, hopefully a little more quickly than we did leaded gas. I mean, I'm not an idiot.

Putting your identity politics ahead of the health of children is....quite a look, I have to say.








2 comments:

Debbie M said...

I just want to say that induction burners are much nicer than the electric coils and are what we're planning to switch to. I am having to get all new pots (even though I still love the Revereware my mom got me in college). I've learned to bring a magnet to the store. Apparently we will also need the kind of plumber who can deal with gas to properly cut off the gas to various appliances.

I don't have a fireplace, but I do have a gas water heater. Now that more and more electricity is coming from wind and solar while more and more gas is coming from fracking, I want to make the switch anyway. But it will be costly.

Thanks, I didn't know all that about leaded gas, even though I am also old enough to have co-existed with it throughout my childhood.

delagar said...

Induction burners do seem the way to go!