Automobile and chemical companies encouraged putting lead in gasoline, even though the hazard was well understood.
If you are a baby boomer and think millennials and Gen Z’ers seem cleverer than you, it’s because they are.
From the 1930s through the 1990s, oil companies added lead to gasoline to make engines run smoother, forcing two generations to breathe leaded air. Older generations have five fewer IQ points on average because they grew up breathing those fumes, Duke University researchers reported in 2017.
In the early days of automobiles, fuel would sometimes combust unequally inside the cylinders, damaging the engine and creating a knocking sound. In 1921, mechanical engineer Thomas Midgley discovered that adding lead to gasoline stopped the knocking. He was feted for his accomplishment.
Within a few years, all refiners added tetraethyllead to gasoline and called it Ethyl. No one would have blamed Midgley for the brain damage foisted on generations if he hadn’t known any better. But he did, and so did a lot of others.
The Greek physician Dioscorides discovered lead was toxic in the 1st century. Harvard Medical School Professor Alice Hamilton told General Motors and DuPont that selling Ethyl would cause widespread poisoning before they launched it.
In 1924, five refinery workers died, and 35 became acutely ill -- including Midgely -- from lead poisoning while blending Ethyl. But under pressure from big corporations, the federal government ignored Hamilton and other critics and allowed leaded gasoline on the market.
In the long run, Hamilton was right, and Midgley was wrong. The mass poisoning became evident, with doctors and environmentalists demanding an end to leaded gasoline. Nevertheless, gasoline companies and automakers defended Ethyl for decades, calling the public health concerns exaggerated.
The Environmental Protection Agency forced the automobile industry to phase out leaded gasoline in the 1970s. Those old enough will remember people like my grandfather who groused about the decision for years, denouncing liberal environmentalists for overblowing the problem.
The turnaround since has been astonishing. Children born in the U.S. after 1980 have higher IQs than their parents. A 2011 United Nations study estimated that the removal of lead from gasoline resulted in $2.4 trillion in annual benefits and 1.2 million fewer premature deaths.
Some nations and companies, though, are still dragging their feet. The last nation to outlaw leaded gas was Algeria in 2021.
Meanwhile, leaded fuel is still used in small planes, 50 years after the federal government began ending its use in automobiles. The petroleum industry didn’t bother to come up with a replacement for the Federal Aviation Administration to approve until now.
The industrial revolution is full of stories about well-meaning scientists, entrepreneurs, industrialists and financiers searching for solutions to the world’s problems. They were willing to break some eggs to make an omelet and believed that sometimes sacrifices must be made for the greater good.
Sometimes, though, people are sacrificed for greater profits, and inconvenient truths go ignored.
Asbestos is a miracle material, providing excellent insulating properties useful for millions of applications. Manufacturers saw an enormous market to make billions of dollars, even though they knew from the beginning that their product was hazardous.
The asbestos industry did not acknowledge that it was poisoning people until lawsuits revealed the truth in the late 1970s. Even then, I had relatives who denied asbestos was a problem, calling the suits a scam to steal corporate profits.
DDT was equally miraculous at killing malarial mosquitoes. Spraying DDT from aircraft helped eliminate malaria and typhus in the southern United States in the 1940s. But 20 years later, scientists discovered DDT was building up in human fatty tissue and killing predatory birds.
DDT’s makers initially called the scientists hysterical until the scientific evidence became overwhelming. Regulation only came after the public demanded limits on where and when DDT is used.
The list of industrial innovations that turned out to be environmental disasters can go on and on. Our regulatory system encourages corporations to push out a profitable product first and worry about consequences later. Few companies voluntarily act without a government mandate.
The world is again caught in one of those awkward periods where we know fossil fuels are heating the planet, but we are reluctant to wean ourselves off them. We have invested trillions of dollars in the fossil fuel industry, and switching to alternatives will be difficult.
Science tells us, though, we can only release so much more carbon dioxide and avoid irreparable harm to future generations.
At the COP27 Climate Conference, diplomats negotiated for weeks and accomplished nothing, partially because fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered representatives from the most vulnerable countries.
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