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

smithsonianmag.com

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

#91

Post by pjc50 »

vorticalbox wrote: post #71
hunmernop wrote: post #70

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.

This is a very stale set of talking points.

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

#92

Post by aidenn0 »

aftbit wrote: post #81
Onavo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 certifi…

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.

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

#93

Post by wolvoleo »

vorticalbox wrote: post #71
hunmernop wrote: post #70

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.

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.

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

#94

Post by pjc50 »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #35

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 emissi…

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.

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

#95

Post by aidenn0 »

leoc wrote: post #28

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 belie…

[dead]

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

#96

Post by b-kf »

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)...

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

#97

Post by wolvoleo »

bluGill wrote: post #43
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #35

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 emissi…

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 effo…

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.

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

#98

Post by halJordan »

realusername wrote: post #79
vorticalbox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#99

Post by halJordan »

kevstev wrote: post #73
vorticalbox wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#100

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #76
gilrain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.)

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