Think of it this way, not only was lead gasoline banned, but over the last 30 years we have moved manufacturing jobs to Asia (which has not seen the decline in dementia that the west has).
Manufacturing exposes workers and the surrounding area to all kinds of dusts, chemicals, etc.
My mom tells stories about pesticide trucks driving down the street, spraying entire neighborhoods, when she was a kid. Says it happened pretty often. Kids would chase them, playing in the "clouds". Talk about yikes.
I do wonder what we interact with regularly that future people would have to be paid very well to even be in the same room with, and will think we were nuts for ever thinking was OK. I'm guessing "basically anything plastic, especially if contact with food" is a likely candidate. Fire retardant chemicals in construction materials and furniture, probably.
>I do wonder what we interact with regularly that future people would have to be paid very well to even be in the same room with, and will think we were nuts for ever thinking was OK.
I am betting on combustion engines. It is ridiculous that we have hundreds of millions of those on our streets, releasing the fumes straight into the air where we live our whole lives.
Don't forget rubber tires grinding against asphalt at high speed. Or brake pad dust. We're already at the point we know it's bad to spend much time near highways (say, living within a few hundred feet of them) but haven't, as a culture, really decided to do anything about it yet. Probably because we're too all-in on 55+ MPH roads, so far as infrastructure, so the cost to fix our mistake would be too high.
Staying at a rental that is next to a residential street, the city is very clean and air is great. The street has somewhat alot of traffic and I noticed that the table outside we eat on gets dirty very quickly. Like in one day a wipe on it is black and filthy from the street which is behind a hedge 20ft away.
The balcony of the flat where I live at is unusable because of the major street next to it. There's this same greasy dust everywhere. My guess is that it is soot, covered with unburnt hydrocarbons, from car or oil heating exhaust. It's really disgusting. I have resigned long ago to not let plants intended for consumption grow there...
It's ridiculous now, yes; but don't forget that tech progress is cumulative. We likely needed those "fumes" so something better could come along and stand on its shoulders.
It's pretty exciting to be living during a transition period to cleaner energy. Just as exciting is signs of tangible evidence that this movement is indeed better for our longevity and quality of life. I'm hopeful we will keep progressing.
Oil-based cars and trucks kill people in cities and exacerbate many illnesses like asthma. When they are gone people will wonder why they were ever allowed.
>> When they are gone people will wonder why they were ever allowed.
The engine tech may go away. The vehicles wont. CO2 doesn't cause asthma. Most particulates, at least from non-diesel vehicles, comes from things other than the enigne. Brake pads, tires, even the road surface itself. They all wear down, turning into dust, and get inhaled into our lungs. Electrification won't change that.
One interesting line of research is carbon fiber fires, and increasing problem as many high-end EVs are using CF to reduce weight. One CF vehicle, on fire after an accident, will release a massive amount of very fine particulates that could drift on the wind for many miles.
I'm increasingly convinced that allowing widespread use of automobiles on public roads will be regarded as one of the biggest societal-engineering blunders of all time. Between the health effects (of the cars and roads themselves, plus the secondary effects on physical activity) and the adjustments to city layouts plus extra costs eating most or all of the time-savings anyway, it's hard to see a clear upside. Granted much of that would have been difficult to discern when early decisions on the topic were being made, but that doesn't make it any less an error in its effects.
Look at what city slums were like before widespread motorized transporation. The ability to live in a different area than the coal plant where you worked was a massive improvement to health. Even today, with COVID, the ability to live in suburbs vs high-density inner city biuldings is a benifit.
Then there are the knock-on social mobility benifits such as being able to switch jobs without having to move your family. Or, at a lower level, not having to rent your house/appartment/shack from your employer. Many people see cars as evil today, but realize that today is not yesturday.
I highly recommend researching the Dutch street design. By explicitly avoiding freeways and encouraging biking, they save so much time (no traffic) and money (think long term health benefits of cycling, no pollution, cheaper infrastructure, lower reliance on fossil fuels, fewer accidents, more visits to local businesses) it's insane the rest of the world isn't copying them ASAP.
Vastly enhanced point-to-point mobility seems like a pretty clear upside to me. Absent cars, public transportation would doubtless be better. But people would have far less flexibility in where they lived, where they went for recreation, and in many other things.
The trouble is that, 1) cars are much more expensive, when you tally it all up, than walking and bicycles, so one must count against them the time it takes to pay for them (and if one is very exactly accounting, one might also place some portion of time spent on dedicated, otherwise-unproductive aerobic exercise against cars' account), and 2) once a city's adjusted its girth to account for cars, the points most often factoring into ones point-to-point mobility are much farther apart than they'd have been without adjustments made due to widespread use of cars. Notably this doesn't include only people choosing to move farther apart, but everything being pushed apart by large setbacks from unpleasant roads, enormous highway interchanges, and gigantic parking lots. The car's value, even absent its effects on health and the environment, seems unavoidably to dwindle to very little if too many of them are in use.
Sparing use? Buses, perhaps, emergency vehicles, and possibly delivery trucks? Probably a solid, significant improvement. Individual automobile use on public streets in and around urban areas, and all the adjustments necessary for that to happen or consequent of car-influenced growth patterns? Way, way murkier than one might initially expect, but now very expensive and difficult to reverse regardless, so we're stuck spending a lot more to travel farther and save, if we buy cheap cars and have a high paying job, a little time.
>>>cars are much more expensive, when you tally it all up, than walking and bicycles
Walking and bicycles provide no protection from the elements. Depending on where you live and your occupation, the ability to travel in climate-controlled conditions and arrive with your work clothes unsoiled can be a massive utility benefit.
>>once a city's adjusted its girth to account for cars, the points most often factoring into ones point-to-point mobility are much farther apart than they'd have been without adjustments made due to widespread use of cars. Notably this doesn't include only people choosing to move farther apart, but everything being pushed apart by large setbacks from unpleasant roads
I'd argue that the land area dedicated to roads is a small portion of what forces businesses apart, and that low-density construction and inherently smaller buildings is the major contributing factor. There's only so many shops you can fit into 3-story buildings with narrow footpath-like streets between them. Hanoi is a good example of that. 48QWJ8705424314 (MGRS, paste into Google Maps)
Compare that against the alternative - horses. Horses were a huge sanitary problem - manure and dead horses. Horses also simply killed a lot of people, as they are big and strong and not always controllable.
Apparently some places, like England and New York City, kept very good records on horse and other traffic accidents. Here's a paper that purports to show that horses were dangerous and even more dangerous than cars: The Dangers of Automobile Travel: A Reconsideration, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739679
But I quickly read through the entire thing (JSTOR still has free access: cool!) and AFAICT automobiles were far more dangerous than horses, both in absolute fatalities and presumably even more so adjusting for the number of horses and cars per capita. Toward the end the author tacks on train and streetcar deaths just to make automobile deaths look better. Indeed, it's not until the very end where the author isn't constantly drawing conclusions and providing anecdotes that seemingly contradict his own hard data. Only on a per mile basis, and then only a few decades into the age of the automobile (i.e. after traffic controls become common and pedestrians become persona non grata on the street), are automobiles indisputably safer.
Considering the utter lack of almost all traffic controls prior to the automobile and the way that pedestrians intermixed with horses, the figures are actually astonishing. More astonishing when you look at train and streetcar deaths, which were apparently incredibly lethal. I'm glad I found that paper because almost all other sources I found--which completely lacked any hard evidence--claimed horses were far more dangerous. (So does this one, though the data suggests otherwise.)
I talked to a 60 year old cowboy about the dangers of horses and asked him how many times he was stepped on.
Twice. From 7yo to his early sixties. Given that horses are active participants in traffic and they will go out of their way to not step on you, they would seem to be orders of magnitude safer compared to cars.
I've been stepped on by a horse and my total time dealing with horses is probably less than an hour.
Besides, I'd expect a professional cowboy to know how to protect himself from horses, just like a professional driver is going to have fewer car accidents.
We're all "professional pedestrians" too (on some countries at least even trained as such from early age). You probably weren't prepared appropriately for your encounter with horses.
Absolutely agreed. Tons of knee jerks against this, but I'm almost positive future society will conclude this, unless it's too screwed up itself to spend much effort judging the past.
I feel like vehicles personal vehicles will be considered a societal-engineering blunder when we have personal teleportation available as an alternative.
The widespread existence of them has made everything grow farther apart, due to their needing lots and lots of space and people not wanting to be close to where they're traveling, and they're quite expensive, and for most people it takes time to make money. Their value as a time-saving device in a world that has adjusted for their presence is less overwhelmingly-positive than one might think.
This might be a controversial opinion but I think that's a big plus. Look at old European cities with tiny streets that were mostly designed in times before carriages & cars; vs modern American cities (e.g. upper Manhattan) with large streets, a lot of driving and walking space, etc. Sure, the European model might be more romantic but the US one is definitely more functional (density isn't an issue either; London is much less dense than Manhattan).
I highly recommend researching the Dutch street design. By explicitly avoiding freeways and encouraging biking, they save so much time (no traffic) and money (think long term health benefits, cheaper infrastructure, lower reliance on fossil fuels, fewer accidents, more visits to local businesses) it's insane the rest of the world isn't copying them ASAP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
Almost every automatic nowadays gives you a couple of gears to play with. I always downshift on curves or when braking to a stop. I also drive a hybrid and downshifting guarantees regenerative braking whereas with the pedal it’s easy to over do it and engage the pads.
Thanks, I didn't know engines specifically cut down the fuel supply nowadays when engine braking. I'm not sure charging the car battery used for lights etc counts for much though!
I do think this is significantly different in ICE cars from regenerative braking in EV cars which actually stores the energy and can use it to drive the engine later. This still comes out ahead against ICE cars which don't burn much energy while going downhill.
There's a lot of electricity-driven stuff in ICE cars these days. For example in my car AC is running off car battery, not directly using the engine. When driving in city, start-stop turns off engine at traffic light and AC keeps going.
Regenerative power for starter in frequent start-stop cycle must help a lot too.
Lights do add up too. I remember when a good decade ago day lights were made mandatory all around the year all day long. Very few cars had LED daylights so most people had to run dipped lights. Some people did backyard tests that lights add 0.5L/100km or so. Obviously now LEDs are much more efficient. On the other hand, infotainment system is ever bigger beast. But if regenerative braking power can take off the edge... Why not.
Anyway, I'm not saying that ICE is better than EV. Just saying that ICE can make use of regenerative power.
Exposure to pollution caused by cars and other vehicles is strongly correlated with asthma.[0] I'm glad you mention CO2, which does cause global warming, we might want to try to fix that too before it is too late?
Carbon Fibre is expensive and irrelevant, and fires from it even more so, unless you want to minimise the impact of oil based cars on health in cities. Most popular EVs don't use it.
Traffic is a major source of particulates (20-30%) [1] so reducing it would help a lot, in particular diesel cars and trucks, though yes some things like rubber from tyres would only be helped by traffic reduction, simply switching to EVs would help a lot.
Moving to walking, bikes and public transport for most journeys in cities is the sustainable answer I suspect we'll end up at, and from that future our reliance on individual polluting cars will seem insane. It would require a rethink of some city planning of course, but many people happily live without cars in Europe at the moment.
>>>When they are gone people will wonder why they were ever allowed.
Because they're FUN. https://youtu.be/-mqXXqB7SBQ
Just like eating red meat. It has consequences for you health, but bacon-wrapped filet mignon, in moderation, is worth the consequences.
I'm happy for you to make that sacrifice to your health, I'm not happy for you to impose the health consequences on your poorer neighbours (as happens driving a car in a city).
People are going to wonder why cars and trucks were allowed?
A core part of our transportation network that delivers nearly every product we purchase and moves people around so they can work and have a social life.
Cars do very few deliveries, and hard as it might be to imagine in a US city designed around cars, they're simply unnecessary in a dense city, in fact they negatively impact everyone else. Diesel trucks do not belong in cities IMO.
Yes, people are going to wonder why it was ok to kill others with pollution by driving through cities with combustion engines.
That was DDT. Occassional exposures like that aren't linked to anything horrible in humans. It was banned for its impacts on birds, specifically their eggs. (Google "silent Spring".)
> DDT is classified as "moderately toxic" by the US National Toxicology Program (NTP) and "moderately hazardous" by WHO
> studies document decreases in semen quality among men with high exposures (generally from indoor residual spraying)
> Indirect exposure of mothers through workers directly in contact with DDT is associated with an increase in spontaneous abortions
> studies found that DDT or DDE interfere with proper thyroid function in pregnancy and childhood
> Mothers with high levels of DDT circulating in their blood during pregnancy were found to be more likely to give birth to children who would go on to develop autism
Yeah, I don't know of any particular harm linked to it, it just seems like something we'd never let kids do these days just in case, since "apply magical chemical, it fixes everything and is entirely safe!" has a history of being wrong about the "entirely safe" part. These days I'd expect any plan that includes "we'll spray clouds of this in neighborhoods" to get shut down before it can even start, for that reason.
Except cholrine in pools. And soap. Soap has all sorts of chemicals in it. And perfume. The reality is that we soak ourselves in various chemicals every day. What if that truck was spaying hand sanitizer? It is the chemical that matters, not the method of distribution.
I think you're thinking I'm in the "ZOMG ban dihydrogen monoxide, it's a chemical!" crowd, and I'm not sure why you think that. Also, yes, I'm pretty sure you'd have a hard time convincing people to let you spray hand sanitizer all over their neighborhood, these days, even if they're OK with rubbing it on their hands.
Perfume/colognes popularity seems to wane around the same age group of people who grew up being ok being doused in pesticide. That age group is of course country dependent, but seems to track together
> It is the chemical that matters, not the method of distribution
Found the person that didn't see Batman Begins;
If you think dancing around in aerosol'ed hand sanitizer would be okay, you've clearly never gotten alcohol in your eye, nose, or dare I say throat.
Perfume is also a really interesting one, because some of us do sneeze every time we smell Abercrombie or do start anaphylaxis around flowers or other certain plants. Which comes right around to soap, which, yes, people are allergic to dyes and fragrances in, so we make pure and hypoallergenic.
Chlorine, in pools; We've made drastic progress on that one in society in the last 30 years; from barrels of chlorine when we didn't understand it, to carefully measuring it, to now we have salt reactors that continuously meter it.
I think the point was that we know it's safe (e.g. due to the skin barrier as you mentioned) and we're not likely to change our opinion about soap safety in a decade.
In other words, despite there being many cases of egregious mistakes in safety assumptions due to our bad understanding of science (and/or malice) in the past, we're tempted nowadays to err on the side of caution and probably overestimate the ratio of chemicals we use in our daily life that turned out to be bad, to the ones that we got right.
Sizeable parts of the populace nowadays associates the word chemical with unhealthy. Yet, they buy products that have the word "natural" on it, crafted by mixing and processing products of natural origin. But nature is full of chemicals. Mixing them and processing them, grinding them, heating them up, etc, is what chemical processing is about.
Does it have a sent? Then it is entering your lungs. This was a big deal a few years ago as sandlewood sents in many soaps were linked to hormonal changes in young males.
Scent can be created with as little a few ppm to ppb levels of substances in the air. Most of the typical substances that smell are in too low in concentration to do any harm.
Is classified as moderate toxic but in high acute doses can still kill a children.
Is bioaccumulative, in fatty tissues, and a probable human carcinogen. Acute exposures in girls are said to increase x5 the probability of developing breast cancer as adult.
I don't know if it's less frequent today or if cities are more discrete about it considering modern paranoia. Growing up in the 90s in Florida I remember the trucks driving by on occasion, usually around dusk. If they did it late at night I'd be asleep and would be less likely to notice, so I couldn't say with any certainty how frequently they sprayed.
Also, looking at those videos, the method seems to be different and less noticeable. I remember huge, dense fogs that would envelope the whole neighborhood. In the above videos the spray disappears almost instantly.
We still have mosquito killer smoke sprayed in India in rainy season. I found the similar smell & smoke if I dip a sufficiently heated metal piece in Kerosene.
Japan was the first country to introduce unleaded petrol/gasoline in 1972 and the first to ban leaded petrol in 1986 but, according to the article, they aren't seeing the decreases that Europe and North America are seeing. So that fact doesn't support your hypothesis even though I am sure there have been many other health benefits from the ban.
>>The trend may be related to higher rates of smoking, which makes dementia more likely, in those countries.
There are any number of not-good things in tobacco smoke. The modern reality that we no longer live in a costant haze of other poeple's smoke is probably a huge factor in overall rates for many diseases.
Smoke exposure of any kind seems to have adverse health consequences over the long run. The first thought that jumped to my mind while reading the article was that the colder parts of the western world have been steadily moving towards electric heating, while similar areas in developing countries still use wood/coal more often.
>Smoke exposure of any kind seems to have adverse health consequences over the long run.
It's more general than that. Fine particulate matter (like smoke/soot) tends to get in everywhere and with all the complex molecules in living organisms it's pretty much guaranteed that it will react with something and in large enough quantity that tends to cause disease.
I used to play with lead sheets as a kid. From roofing stuff my grandfather had around. It was fun because it was pleasingly malleable . Often wonder if it had any relationship with health issues
Elemental lead is way less toxic than organic lead compounds like they used to put in gas. Human body does not adsorb elemental lead very efficiently, but it loves that organic stuff. I played with lead as a child, it is a fun metal because you can bend it with your hands so easily or melt it on the stove and cast it in your sandbox(protip: don't use mom's good saucepan).
Elemental mercury is kind of in the same boat as elemental lead. It's poorly absorbed dermally and GI, so you need continuous exposure to be a real problem. It's worst when you're inhaling it, which is bad news because mercury does evaporate at room temperature, and especially when hot.
I doubt you encountered enough mercury, and for long enough, to be any problem unless you were doing something unusual with it. Eating a lot of fish is much more dangerous mercury-wise.
Air pollution in general is much better than it used to be. Particulates for example are known to be associated with memory problems: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31746986/
> Researchers striving to understand the origins of dementia are building the case against a possible culprit: lead exposure early in life. A study spanning 23 years has now revealed that monkeys who drank a lead-rich formula as infants later developed tangles of a key brain protein, called tau, linked to Alzheimer's disease. Though neuroscientists say more work is needed to confirm the connection, the research suggests that people exposed to lead as children—as many in America used to be before it was eliminated from paint, car emissions, water, and soil—could have an increased risk of the common, late-onset form of Alzheimer’s disease.
General aviation (small planes) still use 100LL (low-lead) fuel.
Of course there are some newer GA planes that use JetA (kerosene) instead, but due to heavy regulations, it's really hard to make/certify new planes, so most people still fly 40+ year old carburetor planes.
>General aviation (small planes) still use 100LL (low-lead) fuel.
In vanishingly small quantities and even smaller concentrations (i.e. thinly distributed in the atmosphere making it hard for anyone to get a large dose) to the point which you can pick pretty much any other class of vehicles or source of lead and be reasonably sure it is causing more disease and death. I know it's easy virtue points to rag on it but leaded avgas is just not an issue. GA has no lobby or economic impact to speak of so it's not like it's sticking around through regulatory capture.
