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Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

nytimes.com

111–120 of 154 posts

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#111
post #58
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mistake was anti-proliferation. If every country had nukes wold would be much more peaceful place. Would Iraq or Afganistan got involved if they had capability to deliver nuke to fight enemy combatants in NYC or DC?

What would the Iran - Iraq war look like with nukes? What would a falling dictator à la last days Saddam or Ghadaffi or the Shah do with nukes? That's a very stupid idea if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.

> That's a very stupid idea if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.

Which you can use as a reply to like 90% of comments on this benighted site.

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also emphasize a more social issue to this. There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term. Beyond the endless corporate lobbying and sold out scientists/politicians working to convince everybody that leaded fuel was 100% safe, I think there was also probably a mindset of many in society that 'Well, if leaded fuel is so poisono…

It's infinitely more convenient to assume that the leaders in the past were evil and the masses of the past ignorant than it is to assume they weren't let alone assume they were mostly just like us. It must be nice to be able to make those assumptions and believe them...

Midgley had to be treated for lead poisoning following one of his demonstrations of how safe leaded fuel was. The fact leaded fuel was unsafe would not have come as a surprise to him or anybody else familiar with its development and risks. I don't give much of any consideration to good or evil, but I do to ethics and values. And our society's leaders, corporate and political, have been woefully absent of them for some time, in a trend that seems to be clearly rapidly worsening.

So in that regard I do agree that people of times past were, more or less, the same as today. Yet even the most cursory glance of our history, outside of what is taught in history class, is something that would emphasize that that belief is anything but nice to hold!

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#113
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blood lead levels are overwhelmingly affected by local exposure, basically the history of lead use where you live, work and your food is from. While leaded avgas is not great the FAA just approved a replacement and I'm sure it will be in use quickly because "hurr durr muh lead" is the rallying cry of obnoxious suburbanites who just bought a house beside an airport and now want it shut down and everyone involved in ge…

For some reasons, every area in close proximity to airports with moderate to high piston engine aircraft traffic have exceptional high local exposure (according to EPA). There could be a correlation or even a causation link. EPA at least think so, which is why they changed the rules in 2008 by issuing a new minimum standard. The new replacement fuels are good, but they have one general large drawback. They require a…

> The new replacement fuels are good, but they have one general large drawback. They require a recertification of the engine/frame of the plane. According to the lobby group AOPA, it will cost the industry in excess of $150 billion annually in the US alone.

Also (at least in the UK), UL91 (the unleaded-alternative for some aeroplanes) is more expensive than 100LL. E.g. looking at a nearby (GA) airport, the price for 100LL is £2.22/litre and UL91 is £2.60. You can sometimes use Mogas (literally automotive unleaded) but this has some temperature restrictions due to the vapour point.

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nation's story on it dives much deeper. There was an out and out panic about lead and leaded gasoline in the 1920s that GM and Ethyl/du Pont had to squash, which Midgely happily participated in. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...

[flagged]

A gimmick account dedicated to lead advocacy. Interesting. Could you source any scientific papers (or even a schizo blog post!) we could read through? Because your Venezuelan eyesight anecdote is not very convincing.

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#115
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The mods will deal with you for breaking their rules. You are not my problem to fix.

I don't think I broke any rules, and my comments are on topic. Anyway, why do you fight so hard? You would get cured too.

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A gimmick account dedicated to lead advocacy. Interesting. Could you source any scientific papers (or even a schizo blog post!) we could read through? Because your Venezuelan eyesight anecdote is not very convincing.

[dead]

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The body has plenty of functions that are best left on their default settings or minimized. We're arguing what the 'default' is. I'm arguing the default state is with lead. It would be strange for a protein to evolve to get so easily activated by a toxin. >To show it's healthy you'd need studies showing better health of exposed people, or at least some theoretical reason you'd want lead to make it even plausible. I…

I don't think it's uncontroversial at all. People's health is better for lots of reasons unrelated to lead, so it's very hard to compare. We no longer die of pathogens and injuries as much, even COVID is not as bad as some historical plagues. There's new hazards that didn't exist then, but a some of them are exactly due to the body doing harmful things with surplus nutrition, that's what obesity is. Toxins activate t…

>any more than the baseline level

Again. Can't you see it's a circular argument? How did you determine that it's the 'baseline'?

>people are likely getting more lead than 100 years ago.

People used to get much more. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also emphasize a more social issue to this. There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term. Beyond the endless corporate lobbying and sold out scientists/politicians working to convince everybody that leaded fuel was 100% safe, I think there was also probably a mindset of many in society that 'Well, if leaded fuel is so poisono…

The Nation's story on it dives much deeper. There was an out and out panic about lead and leaded gasoline in the 1920s that GM and Ethyl/du Pont had to squash, which Midgely happily participated in. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...

> which Midgely happily participated in

Which moves him from the category of buffoon to evil.

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#119

This Cautionary Tales podcast episode talks about him [0]. Both were invented in the service of DuPont. CFC at least helped making refrigeration safer and helped getting it to the masses. Leaded gasoline on the other hand was always known as a bad idea. In both cases though, DuPont fought back hard to prevent bans of these solutions. They rather kill the planet than their profits. Suitably enough he killed himself wi…

I'm going to reiterate a point that needs to be repeated very loudly, as often as possible:

Corporations are malignant paperclip maximizers. We are already in an "AI apocalypse". How many people did leaded fuel kill? Lead exposure makes people stupid and violent - how many wars did it indirectly contribute to, how far back has society been held? That's one corporation. One!!

"Corporations bad" is a sort of tired left wing trope at this point but I think that's because the scale of the problem is difficult to wrap one's head around - it's hard to imagine an alternate world. But we didn't choose to inhabit a world run by corporations, it just happened through a process of blind natural selection, and it will kill us all unless we do something about it now. Our current governments are clearly inadequate - we need to be consciously, deliberately, constructing alternate ways of organizing ourselves, as rapidly as possible, to combat the threat of this new lifeform. And make no mistake, it is combat - they will fight back! They will fight back on a level so subtle and insidious that you will be convinced that there is no fight, or that you are powerless, or that the anti-corporate movement is on the wrong side.

What can you do about it? You're an HN reader, you can probably make websites. Build something designed to facilitate collective action. Bring out the best in people. Make it so that when we all know that something is bad, no fucking corporation can pay off the government to be allowed to do it anyway.

Re: Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

#120
post #21

Not so one-sided, Fritz Haber [0] is another very interesting chemist. Got a Nobel prize for the process to synthesize ammonia (modern fertilizer production), but then also got side tracked with the 1st world war and became the father of chemical warfare [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

Nobel, inventor of dynamite, created the Nobel prizes to whitewash his name. It sure worked.

"by his death, his business had established more than 90 armaments factories, despite his apparently pacifist character."

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

How ‘merchant of death’ Alfred Nobel became a champion of peace https://www.thelocal.se/20101004/29406/

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