America Was Wrong About Leaded Gas - For 100 Years!

If you were born in the United States before 1996, you probably were exposed to lead from

leaded

gasoline and are less intelligent as a result. Wait a minute. I was born before '96. I'm stupid, but wait, it gets better. We still use Hello everyone and welcome. In this video we are covering the infuriating history of

leaded

fuel and there are three main topics we need to cover. First of all, we knew it was dangerous from the beginning. At first, we've used it for a whole century, so we started with ethanol, decided to get lead poisoning for 100

years

, and then went back to using ethanol.

Secondly, we still use it today. Yes, this air here could have led to Es because I'm not that far from a local airport. Can you hear that sound that is the sound of let it feel? And third, a new study indicates that we're dumber for it, like all of us, and you're especially at risk if you are. born between 1966 and 1975. we'll get into that, well let's start from the beginning, ethanol was actually viable not only as a fuel but also as an additive in the early 1900's, even people like henry ford liked it, so when you drink ethanol and if you add it to gasoline it increases the octane level, this allows engines to run more efficiently and make more power, so increasing the octane level is a good thing, but in 1864 we had crazy taxes on alcohol .

A gallon was equivalent to two dollars and fifty cents. fifty dollars a gallon in today's money gasoline wasn't taxed that much, you can probably blame this on politics, so it was about 20 cents a gallon in 1906, about 6.50 in today's money, so That if alcohol is prohibitively expensive, what can we do right in 1921? General Motors chemist named Thomas Midgley discovered that when he added tel, a lead additive to gasoline, it eliminated knock, meaning the fuel now allowed engines to make more power and run more efficiently, so In 1923 it reached the market. Refineries would mix tel, which they called ethyl liquid, into gasoline before it was distributed to gas stations, so we started using this product even though there were immediate signs that lead was a very, very bad idea.

Some examples exploded twice while Midgley worked with him in 1922 and suffered lead poisoning in 1923. In September 1923, a worker died a month after Dupont began tel production at its deepwater New Jersey facilities. Three more workers died during the summer and fall of 1924 at the deepwater facilities. In January 1925, Dupont began a different teal production process in its depths. water facility and 4 workers died that winter, okay so people who come into contact with these things keep dying and then here's a very telling anecdote, workers at the deep water facility experienced hallucinations so frequently that they called the butterfly house installation, people kept dying from it.

Then in 1924, the state of New Jersey ordered teo production to be shut down, so we stopped making teo for a second and the U.S. surgeon general said, “We need a committee to check the safety of teo.” and in January 1926, the committee found that there are no good reasons to ban the use of ethyl gasoline, so later that year lead returns to our gas, so let's summarize so far first and think that ethanol is pretty good , we're going to tax it out and then we decide to put lead in our fuel, oh a bunch of people are hallucinating and dying, the committee says okay, so we keep using lead in our car fuel until 1996, 70

years

Then, now there's two pieces of positive news that come from all this that help explain why we were so dumb for so long?

Well, first of all, we were all breathing lead, so you know we were dumber for it. So how could we make a smart decision about lead? But secondly, we finally came to our senses and realized that lead was bad for us, so we found an alternative that we started using in the 1970s called mtbe. Well, here's a great anecdote. Refineries began using mtbe as an anti-knock additive in 1979. Refineries were aware of mtbe's effect on the environment as early as 1981. The hydrogeologist for the Shell oil company testified that the running joke within Shell was that mtbe really meant, among other things, things, that most things biodegrade more easily, so it turns out that this mtbe stuff was contaminating the water supplies and it was very difficult to get rid of, so we stopped using it and once again went back to ethanol, so That today we blend 10 ethanol into our gasoline in part because it helps raise the octane level, meaning our modern engines can run more efficiently and generate more power.

All right, so to sum it up again, we thought, "Hey, this ethanol thing is pretty cool." We used it, no, then we poisoned ourselves for 70 years, hell yeah, freedom, baby, and then we went back to using ethanol, so that's it. Case closed, unfortunately, I have more bad news which brings us to the second part of this video that we are still using. lead today is still floating in the air maybe this air right here yes, to this day we still sell something called avgas 100 ll which is used in small piston engine airplanes, of which there are an estimated 170,000 of these aircraft in the US air fleet.

The reason for continuing to use this fuel is the safety of the aircraft. Yes, I don't want planes to fall out of the sky either, but why do we use safety as an excuse for pilots but not for the millions of people poisoned by fuel? Friends, your captain is speaking, in the event of an emergency, oxygen masks will be dropped for the pilots due to the extreme lack of oxygen, the passengers will likely pass out and suffer permanent brain damage. This is normal if you are flying with children today and is worth noting. All other forms of transportation, including, of course, all major airline planes flying in the sky, managed to use fuel that does not contain lead.

It's a problem we can solve but we choose not to and to be fair there are alternatives in development but it seems like without some kind of regulatory pressure we're just going to keep pretending it's not a real problem now as mentioned, This jet fuel is called avgas 100 ll in which ll means low lead which is ironic I guess it's kind of a funny joke within the industry because are you ready for this? The legal limit for lead in leaded gasoline for automobiles in 1986 was 0.1 grams per gallon. Today, Avgas 100 ll allows 2.1 grams per gallon, in other words, more than 20 times what was allowed for automotive use. in 1986, I guess because it's like it's from a plane, not a car, so lead couldn't get into the air we breathe, I mean the air is very high up and we are very low down, wow, it turns out that Yeah.

It doesn't work that way, a 2021 study looking at a regional airport found that children who lived downwind from the airport had higher blood lead levels with increases of 0.4 micrograms per deciliter compared to children who lived upwind from the airport for contextual lead levels detected during the The peak of the Flint water crisis was between 0.35 and 0.45 micrograms per deciliter above the baseline value, meaning it could be as problematic like in Flint Michigan wherever there are regional airports, so yes, we are talking about a problematic amount of lead in the air, which lends excuse me brings us to the final segment of this video the impact that lead has had on our intelligence look maybe the jokes could have been better if my development years had been during the tick-tock era instead of the toxic metal era interesting question tick-tock or lead, which is worse for your brain, okay, just a little extra context on why lead is such a big problem.

Two quotes starting with the CDC, a safe blood level has not been identified in children, and secondly, the national academies of sciences, lead has not. They appear to exhibit a minimum concentration in the blood below which there are no health effects; In other words, as far as we know, any amount of lead in the blood is a bad thing. Lead is a neurotoxin that damages the brain and nervous system, which is particularly important. for children because it can slow growth and development, cause learning and behavioral problems, and hearing and speech problems, it makes us like we're dumb today and I mean literally a recent study done in the state of Duke and Florida found that half of the US population had been exposed to adverse levels of lead in early childhood, okay, this is where things get a little confusing, so let me clarify, according to our loyal know and understand, any amount of lead in the blood is a bad thing, but the CDC defines a reference level of blood lead as 5. micrograms per deciliter basically this is of clinical concern, so remember when I mentioned that things were particularly problematic for those born between 1966 and 1975, this Duke study found that 100 percent of the US population born between those years had childhood blood levels above 5 micrograms per deciliter. this is crazy from 1951 to 1980, three decades of US history, the vast majority, more than 90 percent of children had lead levels high enough to cause clinical concern above five micrograms per deciliter, and several months before this study came out, the CDC revised that number to 3.5 micrograms.

There is good news in that today it is estimated that only 2.5 of us children are above that threshold thanks to efforts like removing lead from our gasoline, but it is still a very real problem, about 10 million people lived in the US in 2015. had blood lead levels above 25 micrograms 10 million people at seven times the CDC's current level of concern that's a real problem because, as I mentioned, lead impairs development, making us less intelligent than we should have been, the Duke study estimated that as of 2015 the average American dropped 2.6 IQ points from lead exposure alone, which is the average American if you're in these higher exposure groups, like children in the 1970s, which is closer to six points. of IQ.

Greater exposure correlates with greater IQ point losses, the study estimates a total of 824 million 97,690 IQ points have been removed from American citizens due to lead. It's no surprise that a news channel has an audience, so you might be thinking, "Well, this is just a study and it's very new. We need some time to figure all this out." This is not a new idea at all, a 2005 study that looked at blood lead levels and more than 300 children around the world found that IQ was significantly lower if they had higher blood lead levels. Nice graphs showing that more lead is dumber.

Okay, but we don't have a fuel that these little planes can run on, so we have to keep using it correctly. I mean, there is no other possible reason other than we simply don't have the technical capability to create a fuel that would make these planes work according to the Federal Aviation Administration or the FAA. Currently there are no regulations that apply to aircraft emissions. that use leaded fuel there are no regulations none listen to me for a second do you think that no emissions regulation could play the slightest role in why we continue to use leaded fuel in these airplanes if your answer is no, not only have you ingested too much lead but would also disagree with the FAA in literally the next sentence the FAA enforces existing emissions standards for commercial engines and airplanes through the engine certification process Commercial jet engine manufacturers have responded to the emissions reduction requirements through technological changes improving the designs and efficiency of jet engines, so we have come full circle: we ingested lead, which made us dumb, which meant we couldn't understand why we were dumb . meaning that we would do nothing about what was causing us to be dumb, ensuring that future generations would also be made dumb so that they would not do anything about what is also making us dumb, the circle of fools that the FAA is currently evaluating and considering a plan to eliminate lead emissions from general aviation by 2030.

I hope we do something. ManyThank you all for watching now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to eat the paint off the walls of my old house. It has this metallic taste that helps me forget things.