Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by lo_zamoyski » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

wk_end wrote: post #247

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government should be active and in charge of urban planning. It is a matter of the common good. 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 tra…

I don't know where you live, and this is going to be very dependent on where you live, but in most places that are experiencing these issues I think you actually have the problem backwards. For any given parcel of land, building upwards would be the more profitable move. Local governments deliberately legislate planning that prioritizes single-family homes, cars, and sprawl; developers are then forced to operate with…

That's not urban planning. That's local gov't creating incentives through legislation and regulation. Urban planning means actually planning roads and distribution of utilities and schools and medical services and shopping areas and town squares and parks and so on. The town takes charge of its own future. Developers must then fit within this scheme. Instead, today we leave it up to developers to design roads and build wherever they want. It's a disaster.

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.)

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

#302

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

breakyerself wrote: post #86

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…

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…

You are acting as if they are somehow equal. Unfortunately, environmental regulations have three huge problems:

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.

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

#303

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #172

breakyerself wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl design was never in use in the US, but nuclear went through a long period of near universal public opposition to its expansion because of the high profile disasters that it caused. 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.

Chernobyl may have done a lot to inflame cultural imagination of what could happen in the worst cases, but the US still had its own high profile disasters like Three Mile Island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

A "disaster" that killed nobody.

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.)

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

#304

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

mattmaroon wrote: post #145

breakyerself wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl design was never in use in the US, but nuclear went through a long period of near universal public opposition to its expansion because of the high profile disasters that it caused. 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.

It would. People are still building some natural gas plants even despite renewables being cheaper and nuclear is far cheaper over its lifecycle than that and, other than regulatory issues, is basically better in every way.

Renewables are only "cheaper" because the market forces major subsidies. The reality is the value of renewables is the fuel they save. They do not replace the generators or any of the other stuff.

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

#305

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #186

nokcha wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that environmental regulations that impede building modern nuclear power plants to replace coal power plants are net harmful. Nuclear power safety has advanced a lot since Chernobyl.

The closest I've gotten to somebody finding environmental regulations that were driving up the cost of nuclear was with some of the latest stuff with people trying to get rid of the LNT model of how radiation affects people. 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…

Shielding isn't going to be a major portion of the cost. Exposure is from stuff that leaks, not stuff that comes through the walls.

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.

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

#306

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

fuzzfactor wrote: post #252

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethanol has a propensity to suck up ambient moisture and is more demanding of rubbers and happily attacks aluminum. 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 pic…

>Ethanol has a propensity to suck up ambient moisture and is more demanding of rubbers and happily attacks aluminum. 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 alumi…

Alcohols have a strong tendency to pull water out of the atmosphere if the percentage of water in the alcohol is below whatever that particular alcohol favors. The only way to keep it dry is to seal it up.

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

#307

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 7:28 PM UTC

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…

There are some old aircraft whose engines were designed in the expectation of the lead.

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

#308

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #50

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…

Your tone suggests you think they are generally not based on science and given cost benefit analysis. Probably a reflection of your media intake. 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…

Reagan got it half right. The problem is the cost of figuring out the cost/benefit doesn't get considered.

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

#309

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #182

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…

> 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. 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…

But you are showing an example of an improper regulation.

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

#310

Post by LorenPechtel » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

lysace wrote: post #167

During the past year I have discovered that almost all retailers here in Sweden have voluntarily replaced their usual Teflon/polytetrafluoroethylene/PTFE frying pan coatings with something called 'ceramic'. (This includes IKEA globally, I assume.) 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 l…

Yeah, the alternatives aren't as good. They're safer, though.

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.