Declaring victory:
Getting rid of ETHYL Leaded gasoline took too long and cost too much, but it's still a great achievement ...By Bill Kovarik
News item: Oct. 27, 2011. United Nations Declares Victory in Global Eradication of Leaded Gasoline Also see main report: United Nations Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles
Phasing out leaded gasoline in the face of longstanding industry opposition is a great achievement, but its only one of a very few environmental victories in the 21st century.
The fact that it has taken a huge global effort to make this happen is, for an environmental historian, a long-overdue victory that took too long and cost too much. Ever since the lead phase-out began in the US in 1975, we've been reminded of Georges Santayana's idea that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.
As early as 1924, lead was such an obvious and well-known poison that public health experts reacted with alarm when General Motors and Standard Oil announced plans to add it to
gasoline.
For example, Alice Hamilton, an MD and head of the Harvard public health program, told GM research chief he was "nothing but a murderer" for insisting that only leaded gasoline could boost octane and raise compression ratios. In fact, it was well known that there were plenty of useful and affordable alternatives.
Given the public health benefits that are now ascribed to eliminating leaded gasoline, and the damage that this implies, Hamilton was exercising restraint with this understatement.
The main point is this: if it took 90 years to eradicate a well-known poison from a product that everyone uses routinely, what does that say about the way our public health system is working?
The leaded gasoline conflict is a special problem in environmental history and the history of communication, and the following are some of my own papers on the subject:
- Ethyl: the 1920s Controversy over Leaded Gasoline and Alternative Fuels is a 2003 paper presented to the American Society of Environmental History.
- Ethyl-leaded Gasoline How a classic occupational disease became an international public health disaster,” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, October 2005;11:384–397 (PDF)
- Henry Ford, Charles F. Kettering and the Fuel of the Future demonstrates the wide extent to which alternatives to leaded gasoline, particularly renewable fuels, were known and preferred by Ford and Kettering. The paper was published by the Society of Automotive Historians in 1998.
- Agenda Setting in the 1924 - 1926 Public Health Controversy over Ethyl (Leaded) Gasoline is an examination of the media involvement in the leaded gasoline controversy in a 1994 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication paper.
- Charles F. Kettering and the 1921 Discovery of Tetraethyl Lead In the Context of Technological Alternatives An early look at leaded gasoline in light of its many developmental problems. The paper was presented to the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1994.
- Sixty Years of Tetraethyl Lead This is part of a web site put together which chemical engineer Matthew Hermes under a National Science Foundation funded grant for education in chemistry through Kennesaw State University.
- Special Motives: Automotive Inventors and Alternative Fuels in the 1920s Paper to the Society for the History of Technology, 2007
- Fascinating Quotes from people involved in the leaded gasoline scandals.
- The Lead Diary lists documents still missing from public archives that should be released by the industry. Over one million pages are still missing from the public archives as of 2011.
- Heroic Myths and Tetraethyl Lead is a brief historical essay written for the Chemcases.com project funded by the National Science Foundation in 2001.