Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented

There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.

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 beliefs became entrenched:

1. that lead is natural to the human body, and

2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed

Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]

A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.

Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again...

[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...

> countries where leaded gasoline was—or still is—used

Note: it’s now banned for road vehicles everywhere [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n... Algeria, 2021

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.

and still sprayed all around the surrounding land at almost every airport in the USA and worldwide from prop aircraft exhaust despite knowing ANY amount is toxic and irreversible for 30+ years

* https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

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)...

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 emissions? Sure, but the stuff is getting flared off as waste at refineries anyway, and we're not going to stop making plastics and fertilisers any time soon, so may as well extract useful work from burning it!

We could have had incredibly clean cities everywhere by now, by simply keeping older cars on the road and adapting them to run on much cleaner safer fuel.

But there was a problem, an absolute bombshell of a problem. The fatal flaw that killed LPG as a road fuel.

It didn't sell new cars. It didn't sell anyone any debt.

So they came up with "scrappage schemes" where you'd get a couple of hundred quid for your old car, it would get destroyed, and then all you had to do was buy a nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel car instead, at some swingeing rate of interest (expect to pay well over twice the sticker price by the end of it - and no, you didn't get the Scrappage Scheme cash if you didn't take the finance package).

And you see how well that worked out.