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Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

attheu.utah.edu

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Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#271

Post by munificent »

jmward01 wrote: post #270
munificent wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People look around and see reasonable water and breath reasonable air 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 iss…

I agree the problem has more than one aspect, but we made real progress that we are now backtracking on nationally. Local problems will always be local. Go to a town and they will likely be pro that industry but as a nation we recognized local pollution didn't stay local and created things like the EPA and implemented regulations that worked. Now we are backtracking because, I think, people haven't felt the problems…

Man, I honestly don't know.

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.

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#272

Post by wat10000 »

tjohns wrote: post #260
wat10000 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaded gasoline for cars started phasing out 52 years ago. It was fully banned 30 years ago. If there was any urgency behind getting rid of leaded avgas it would have been gone in that timeframe. 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 exc…

Cars don't need high octane fuel, aircraft do. Outside of the absolute smallest aircraft, you can't get enough power out of automobile gasoline. 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 formulation…

"They started looking at it 14 years ago" is all you need to see that there's no urgency. They should have started looking at it 60+ years ago when it first started being a prominent issue for cars. It's not like they didn't know about the problem.

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.

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#273

Post by lowdownbutter »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #215
lowdownbutter wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shouldn't you always decide to help the most people? no.

Why?

Who shall we sacrifice for the greater good? Shall we sacrifice one child for two elderly? One healthy adult for two sick?

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#274

Post by epistasis »

triceratops wrote: post #261
slavik81 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The £700M (960M USD) spent on fish protection measures at Hinkley Point C would be a topical example [1]. It's expected to save an average of a few hundred twaite shad, six river lamprey, and eighteen allis shad per year, plus one salmon every twelve years, and a trout every thirty-six years. https://www.salmonbusiness.com/nuclear-plants-new-700-millio...

The article you linked says "According to a government-commissioned review, Hinkley Point C’s suite of “fish protection measures” will cost more than £700 million". I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?

Edit: here's Guardian reporting on the report cited by Salmon Business https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/12/health-and-... . As somebody who has spent nearly all of my political activity in the past 8 years trying to change local regulations to allow more housing, the whole thing reeks of unfair analysis on all sides and hyper-partisanship. I largely think there should be a more rational evaluation of requirements all around, but it does sound like the 44 tons of killed fish per year is pretty small compared to other human impact, but $700M is not going to save Hinkley Point C.

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.

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#275

Post by triceratops »

epistasis wrote: post #274
triceratops wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you linked says "According to a government-commissioned review, Hinkley Point C’s suite of “fish protection measures” will cost more than £700 million". I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?

Edit: here's Guardian reporting on the report cited by Salmon Business https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/12/health-and-... . As somebody who has spent nearly all of my political activity in the past 8 years trying to change local regulations to allow more housing, the whole thing reeks of unfair analysis on all sides and hyper-partisanship. I largely think there should be a more rational evaluation of req…

Thanks!

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#276

Post by brailsafe »

gwbas1c wrote: post #198
breakyerself wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated. 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…

> If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good 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 fi…

> 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

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#277

Post by cfiggers »

mktk1001 wrote: post #39
cfiggers wrote: post #28

In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated. 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 force…

Who is proposing for environment regulation without proper scientific evidence? You both sided the argument without giving any claims about environment regulation that turned out to be not helpful.

Are you aware of scientific evidence that supports mandating paper drinking straws?

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#278

Post by enaaem »

cfiggers wrote: post #28

In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated. 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 force…

It's better to over regulate than under regulate, if you look at it in terms of utility. The damage of under regulation can be catastrophic, like people getting cancer or irreversible loss of species. Based on examples I read here, overregulation is much easier to solve. For example, the weaponisation of environmental regulation to block new development is a political problem not a technical one, which is solvable if people really want to.

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#279

Post by vintermann »

munificent wrote: post #208
vintermann wrote: post #13

> The Utah part of this is so interesting because of the way people keep track of their family history. Definitively interesting that they could get so many old hair samples with good provenance.

It's interesting that the paper doesn't mention this, but the answer here is Latter Day Saints. They have a very strong culture of genealogy and preserving family history. The study authors are all in Salt Lake City, which is the Mormon capital of the world.

Yes, I guess they assumed it went without saying.

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).

Re: Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

#280

Post by gwd »

darknavi wrote: post #132
gwd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Technology Connections also released a great rant on it (and more) recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

That one was more about how "midwestern values" made him pro-solar, whereas the Hank Greek one was specifically about how bad coal is.
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