Just wait for the follow up study in 70 years on the microplastics and the brake and tire dust. It is amazing how much we’ve disturbed the world and our own population through industrialization. And most of it wasn’t even beneficial to us! Weigh the industrial efforts to build public infrastructure or anything collectively beneficial like medicine against the useless consumer crap product economy that is doomed for a landfill before long and its not even close. Thats the junk that’s backing up the ports and freight railways: not parts for trains or precursors for medicines. And it continues because there’s just too much money to be made for anyone to stop for a second and consider the direction we are heading based on what our actions actually do for this planet. There’s no real leadership on this planet capable of creating actual significant change, only people put in power to preside over the profitable status quo.
cars + tires did represent a major public health breakthrough at the time, because cities were struggling under the weight of daily animal fecal matter and animals dropping dead in the streets.
How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?
I'm all for it, I'm for policies that "force" people to change certain careers or lifestyles in a sensible way, and I'm sure there's a good solution however imperfect it may be.
> How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?
Just thinking off the top of my head, but build out rail infrastructure to decrease long-distance truck transport and replace it with rail freight? Trains have metal wheels, so no tire dust.
For some of the other stuff, I'd really like to see durability/repairability prioritized over lowest initial purchase cost, as well as disposability be greatly discouraged (at least when it comes to plastic). My intuition is that could also lead to a lower TCO for a lot of products.
The same way we reduced pollution from tailpipes. Studies, tests and legislation.
Weirdly enough in the US there is the UTQG (Uniform Tire Quality Grading) which includes treadwear, and the EU tire label does not. The EU label does include noise, but the US one does not.
In general treadwear warranties are a thing here in the states, but I've never seen them in Europe.
I wonder if this is why tires are louder here in the states, are harder tires last longer.
We can require that different tire material be used—more natural rubbers can be used (albeit at a slightly higher cost) that produce less harmful dust.
You don't start with evidence, you don't even start with a hypothesis, you start with an aesthetic intuition and chase it, like a heliocentric model with ptolemaic epicycles vs newton's model, both describe the phenomena at hand, how do we pick the one that guides our next questions?
The intuition that we should globoindustrially produce man-made materials and dispose of novel waste materials in our water supplies until proven toxic and cancerous is a mistake, and we should be coming at the question from the other side, assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful than man-made ones until we have evidence indicating otherwise.
It turns out that it is really, really hard and motivated work to find evidence of the harmfulness of many materials, and there is no commercial incentive to do so, and the health of human beings and the natural world are suffering because we accept "three papers in the last 2 years checked this novel plastic and couldn't find much evidence of harm" as a good enough answer before we start manufacturing thousands of tons of it and dumping the manufacturing wastes into our rivers.
So, we should consider materials dangerous because of aesthetic feelings, not evidence, and that lack of evidence should be taken as evidence they are dangerous?
I don't think you realize you've descended in self parody here.
How much evidence is sufficient to establish harmfulness or the absence of harmfulness? How do you determine, in general, the sufficiency of evidence to answer any given question where our primary access to knowledge is empirical correlation? You can keep yourself afloat a little longer with some yarn about basing that standard on some other empirical residue, but why that empirical residue and not another one? If you consider the question seriously, you will realize that at the bottom is not a set of empirical facts that control our investigations, and how we decide what their conclusions are, but aesthetic intuitions. As noticed by Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger, et al.
And in my view, we have enough evidence that the standards of evidence used by the present regime of medical and ecological scholarship to establish the absence of long term environmental and health risks of novel materials, are seriously insufficient, and the solution must come externally, derived from the mode of knowledge which "science" is subject to and not master of. That mode of knowledge which is capable of hearing all the mountains of papers screaming that "we've checked and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this asbestos here!" and pointing at the world and saying, "Either your mode of investigation was flawed, or your evidence was fabricated, so we should check again."
That's the problem with populists (not bashing OP here, just general observations) - its trivial to pinpoint failings or potential problems down the line in modern society, we are all hyper-exposed to various info about them from all directions.
Now coming up with a reasonable acceptable good solution that would actually work long term and not bring down civilization to its knees, that's another level very rarely seen.
Something much better than 'X is a problem, although with 10,000 side effects, dependencies and benefits, so lets attack X mindlessly full force with no second thought'. It would appeal to me when I was maybe in 15-18, but understanding how hyper complex and connected whole world is can be sometimes quite depressing.
Norway taxes ICE cars extremely highly (more performance meant more tax), EVs don't have this tax, so people who liked performance loved EVs.. Result: >80% of new cars are EVs...
But oh, just "virtue signalling!". Why should anyone do anything without consulting the genius know-it-all that is hereme888?
You start out by measuring tires with some metric, like "pounds of of particulate released pe 50,000 miles when loaded at x", and tax tires with a worse rating higher. Them you're gonna have to keep an eye on additives to tires, because it's always possible someone will find something that makes tires wear slower but the particles more toxic.
Last time this came up, the story was about plastics in the ocean, and following the links on the story was specifically challenging how much tires contribute. Such that I'd love to see any more sources on this.
To be clear, it is a plausible sounding claim. I'm just growing nervous accepting plausible things.
The interwebs say that disc brakes are better able to dissipate heat, provide more consistent braking performance, and generally reduce stopping distance.
Drum brakes are old fashioned, most US vehicles switched to at least disc brakes in the front in the late 1970s and early 80s. Drums in the rear make the parking brake simple, and rear brake performance is less important as more braking force comes from the front.
I don't know about being "for poor people", except that poor people may be more likely to have older vehicles, but I don't know that that extends to using vehicles that old, most vehicles with drums are 40+ years old at this point, and keeping something that old alive starts to get spendy because parts are trickier to find, and it costs time or money or both to adapt parts from other vehicles (like upgrading to disc brakes from a newer car)
Note that some cars have parking/emergency brakes as drum brakes in the center of a rotor that provides disc brakes for the service (“normal”) brakes, so you can still get disc braking performance with the parking brake cable mechanism.
Drum brakes are also slightly more efficient, with the shoes exhibiting less drag when not applied, which is important on small battery EVs. (They are worse for high-energy or repeated braking, but better in cruise.)
Some modern EVs already use drum brakes on the rear. Since they have regenerative breaking you don't get brake fade on long downhills.
New EU regulations are coming in to limit brake dust and so people are looking at them again. And other ideas, like mercedes has a prototype that puts the brake inside the motor.
They are not sealed perfectly, but every drum that I’ve removed had a pile of shoe dust that was a very significant fraction of the original mass of the shoe friction material worn. I’d estimate that 50% or more of the material ends up at the workshop instead of along the roadside.
If it costs more to replace degraded magnets or motors every million miles compared to brake pads, it will raise the cost of transportation. It's also not feasible to use in ICE vehicles - once you've filled your battery, the only place for that energy to go is heat.
It's not just a tradeoff between ICE and electric, or drum vs pad brakes, or rubber additive A vs B. It's a complex ecosystem upon which people's lives and livelihoods are dependent, with unpredictable and chaotic relationships.
The naive view is to simply replace the apparently "bad" material in tire dust, but if that raises the cost of transportation, food prices go up, quality of life goes down, nutrition suffers, and possible downstream effects end up causing more harm than good.
This isn't to say we shouldn't bother, just that a superficial approach targeted at a single issue could end up doing a lot of unintended damage, and there's no bounded scale of harm. Trying to reduce cancer rates by .0001% might end up reducing average lifespan by a decade, or some other consequence that's orders of magnitude more impactful than the thing being "fixed".
We live in a complex and dynamic system; the supply chain sits at the base of it all. We benefit from the economies of scale serving the supply chain, so we have access to cheap vehicles, efficient and cheap long haul trucks give us access to food and products. Tinker with that too aggressively and people can die.
The best route toward action on things like this are cultural - educate individuals and make alternatives available. People can adjust at their own convenience, and the trend of markets will resolve on a balance between health and safety risks and convenience.
You could simply ban private cars, and presumably 35k fewer deaths would occur each year in the US, and we could work on monolithic solutions to things like brake dust and tire dust. We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms. We need to find where the balance is between the potential harms of these dusts and how much we're willing to give up in mitigating those harms.
Anyway - it's not a trivial exercise, it's a microcosm of the global economy, with surprising complexity and dependencies at every level.
>We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms
Speak for yourself. At least in cities, cars and car-centric cities have absolutely destroyed our economies. People drive for trip less than a mile because walking is miserable, and walking is miserable because the city is built around driving and without regard for pedestrians needing to constantly cross major intersections.
To be fair, cars aren't the root problem here - the root problem is the hypertrophic cities craze that started in the 1780s that made streets so cavernous and muddy (with incredibly wide streets, the middle was often left unpaved to save money, since there was plenty of room on the side to walk) and miserable that cars were a genuine improvement.
Here's the thing that makes tire dust and lead different: at least we get some measurable value from the tires. You can argue that our transportation system is wasteful, that we can use better means and modes, smaller vehicles and tires, but it remains true that we get non-zero benefit from the process any way you look at it.
In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels.
Ethanol was a choice at the time. The fuel companies didn't like the idea of putting what was essentially a competing fuel in their fuel to make it work better and went with the known poison instead.
When thinking about the explanations, keep in mind that leaded gas adoption was near-universal, including economies where "companies" or "competing fuel" weren't really a thing in that sense - e.g. USSR. They still went for leaded gas because of its objective benefits.
And even today, we still use leaded gas for aviation...
It is a horrible trade-off either way, but it was not done for no gain at all.
I'm sure there can be many mitigation approaches that could reduce tire dust exposure by an order of magnitude if regulated. Vehicle weight limits in high density residential areas, plastic mix % in tires, toxic chemical limits in tires, etc.
That's the easy model where you basically know what you are doing is wrong but you like it so you decide to do less of it. The net result is still positive.
An alternative approach is to try to actually innovate and/or invest in means of transport that don't require tyres nor friction for braking (e.g. eddy current brakes).
Didn't (early) engines run significantly better with it? Less knocking, if nothing else?
That was the stated rationale, anyway. It was an anti-knock compound. So, was that false? Did it not help knocking at all? Or was reducing knocking not a benefit at all?
You also have to consider alternatives. Ethanol was skipped because it was more expensive, and then we circled back around once we realized that we were contaminating ground water with MTBE.
Consider this study next time someone says "don't worry, the amount of our chemical in the product is minimal, well below the 'toxic threshhold', and safe to the environment."
Novec is the latest one I can recall, now being discontinued due to environmental and health hazards of forever chemicals.
One day we'll find out just how toxic the effects of trace pharmaceuticals in the environment, food, and water supply have been.
This leads to a serious epistemic crisis where if we are all rational then we all must endeavor to understand that we know nothing about these things. Think about Wi-Fi. You're now going to have to empathize directly with all the people that don't understand it. Since we can't know everything and we can't trust anyone, we must resign to knowing nothing about any of this in general. Best to err on the side of caution though, since now the chance of something being terrible for us is 50/50.
The history of poorly-vetted (or "biasly-vetted") chemicals and trace pharmaceuticals is long and well established. I'm just advocating to advocate for your own health above trusting corporate statements further refined by a marketing team.
I wrote hastily but I said a couple of different things. I meant first that we should not presume to know that the corporate statements are true or false, but at the same time err on the side of caution due to the long and well established track record that you refer to. We can't assume they're dangerous or not dangerous, since we can't really know unless we're an expert in that particular domain, but we won't be experts in all domains relevant to our health, so it makes sense to remain neutrally skeptical while being more risk averse here. Then I was saying that this forces us to empathize with the people who think 5G and Wi-Fi are going to kill them due because they don't understand physics. Their claims are too strong, but their risk aversion due to their ignorance isn't and now we can relate. Do you get what I mean?
There’s sort of no point in discussing this article since the full text is paywalled. The Gizmodo summary seems to suggest that it’s mostly just a meta review plus some extrapolation: they averaged some studies to find the typical effect on mental health and then multiplied it by all the lead exposure in the country.
I’ll suggest an interesting article to read instead. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate if it’s true but it is a good depiction of where p-hacking and correlation-causation mixups could lead.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead
The guy who invented leaded gas is the original -10x engineer. Poisoned an entire nation, destroyed the ozone layer, and killed himself with a homemade gizmo. Unprecedented performance.
I have a feeling that exposure to harmful particles to the brain (the full spectrum, low to high harm) is heavily correlated with political preferences, among other believes, it would be controversial even before executing it but I think it could give important insights.
In San Francisco, you just call the city. They'll give you a few bottles to fill, which they will test. I remember that they even came by personally to either deliver or get them. (Or both?)
It's easy to determine if pipes are made of lead if you can access the pipes. It's less easy to determine if they have some residual lead from upstream pipes that's settled into the corrosion layer on the inside of the pipe (and could be released later)
There are testing services and test strips available for testing your water, which works even if you can't access all the pipes on the way between your source and your sink. A testing service will likely check for a list of contaminants and not simply lead, and most likely have better accuracy and precision than test strips you use yourself.
They also say that lead is rarely injected into the water supply from the water supplier or water mains, but usually much closer to the home (eg. “Goosenecks”).
I'm skeptical. There are far too many other parameters we know to be largely unrelated to lead exposure (e.g. Roe v Wade) that are very difficult to control for. There are too many lead sources—even banned ones—that remain in environments.
Of course, I don't want to dismiss the study. I just want to dismiss jumping to conclusions and overemphasizing one source of change.
Still? You're still skeptical, after all these decades of research & being able to draw direct, 1:1 lines between lead exposure and the health issues it causes?
There's plenty of room for debate on how to fix this problem. The debate on if it's a problem has been dead for decades, if not centuries.
Lead poisoning was written about in Roman times, so you could argue that it's millennia of research. (There's a theory that the fall of the Roman empire was due to lead poisoning - likely from lead-lined aqueducts). However, after the Romans, it wasn't picked up again until the 17th century, so quite plausibly "centuries" of research.
Of course, it used to be relatively easy to avoid lead poisoning (e.g. not using it for water pipes) until we started to pump lots of it into the air around the 1950s.
The Romans didn't need to get it from the water, they directly used it as a flavoring called "sapa." Apparently it was one of the first artificial sweeteners and is actually pretty delicious.
No idea if that's true, but I've heard that's also why the absurd (and terrifying) seeming "children eating paint chips containing lead" is an actual occurrence. Because those lead chips taste sweet.
Just wait for the follow up study in 70 years on the microplastics and the brake and tire dust. It is amazing how much we’ve disturbed the world and our own population through industrialization. And most of it wasn’t even beneficial to us! Weigh the industrial efforts to build public infrastructure or anything collectively beneficial like medicine against the useless consumer crap product economy that is doomed for a landfill before long and its not even close. Thats the junk that’s backing up the ports and freight railways: not parts for trains or precursors for medicines. And it continues because there’s just too much money to be made for anyone to stop for a second and consider the direction we are heading based on what our actions actually do for this planet. There’s no real leadership on this planet capable of creating actual significant change, only people put in power to preside over the profitable status quo.
cars + tires did represent a major public health breakthrough at the time, because cities were struggling under the weight of daily animal fecal matter and animals dropping dead in the streets.
How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?
I'm all for it, I'm for policies that "force" people to change certain careers or lifestyles in a sensible way, and I'm sure there's a good solution however imperfect it may be.
> How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?
Just thinking off the top of my head, but build out rail infrastructure to decrease long-distance truck transport and replace it with rail freight? Trains have metal wheels, so no tire dust.
For some of the other stuff, I'd really like to see durability/repairability prioritized over lowest initial purchase cost, as well as disposability be greatly discouraged (at least when it comes to plastic). My intuition is that could also lead to a lower TCO for a lot of products.
The same way we reduced pollution from tailpipes. Studies, tests and legislation.
Weirdly enough in the US there is the UTQG (Uniform Tire Quality Grading) which includes treadwear, and the EU tire label does not. The EU label does include noise, but the US one does not.
In general treadwear warranties are a thing here in the states, but I've never seen them in Europe.
I wonder if this is why tires are louder here in the states, are harder tires last longer.
Less trucks, more trains. Pulling a random internet quote:
The Association of American Railroads estimates that on average, a freight train can move 1 ton of freight about 484 miles on just one gallon of fuel.
We can require that different tire material be used—more natural rubbers can be used (albeit at a slightly higher cost) that produce less harmful dust.
As I understand it, a major problem with tyre pollution is the 6PPD-Quinone used.
https://avadaenvironmental.com/2024/05/27/the-environmental-...
And a chemical like this is needed to protect natural rubber from ozone.
However, I doubt this specific chemical could not be replaced in that role, now that we know it's a problem.
What is the evidence that natural rubber is less harmful?
You don't start with evidence, you don't even start with a hypothesis, you start with an aesthetic intuition and chase it, like a heliocentric model with ptolemaic epicycles vs newton's model, both describe the phenomena at hand, how do we pick the one that guides our next questions?
The intuition that we should globoindustrially produce man-made materials and dispose of novel waste materials in our water supplies until proven toxic and cancerous is a mistake, and we should be coming at the question from the other side, assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful than man-made ones until we have evidence indicating otherwise.
It turns out that it is really, really hard and motivated work to find evidence of the harmfulness of many materials, and there is no commercial incentive to do so, and the health of human beings and the natural world are suffering because we accept "three papers in the last 2 years checked this novel plastic and couldn't find much evidence of harm" as a good enough answer before we start manufacturing thousands of tons of it and dumping the manufacturing wastes into our rivers.
So, we should consider materials dangerous because of aesthetic feelings, not evidence, and that lack of evidence should be taken as evidence they are dangerous?
I don't think you realize you've descended in self parody here.
How much evidence is sufficient to establish harmfulness or the absence of harmfulness? How do you determine, in general, the sufficiency of evidence to answer any given question where our primary access to knowledge is empirical correlation? You can keep yourself afloat a little longer with some yarn about basing that standard on some other empirical residue, but why that empirical residue and not another one? If you consider the question seriously, you will realize that at the bottom is not a set of empirical facts that control our investigations, and how we decide what their conclusions are, but aesthetic intuitions. As noticed by Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger, et al.
And in my view, we have enough evidence that the standards of evidence used by the present regime of medical and ecological scholarship to establish the absence of long term environmental and health risks of novel materials, are seriously insufficient, and the solution must come externally, derived from the mode of knowledge which "science" is subject to and not master of. That mode of knowledge which is capable of hearing all the mountains of papers screaming that "we've checked and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this asbestos here!" and pointing at the world and saying, "Either your mode of investigation was flawed, or your evidence was fabricated, so we should check again."
This seems like a barely connected rant about how nothing is real, but if you have evidence you should just link it.
I was asking for any evidence that natural rubber is less harmful. None was provided.
Maybe it would be better to destroy the global economy though.
That's the problem with populists (not bashing OP here, just general observations) - its trivial to pinpoint failings or potential problems down the line in modern society, we are all hyper-exposed to various info about them from all directions.
Now coming up with a reasonable acceptable good solution that would actually work long term and not bring down civilization to its knees, that's another level very rarely seen.
Something much better than 'X is a problem, although with 10,000 side effects, dependencies and benefits, so lets attack X mindlessly full force with no second thought'. It would appeal to me when I was maybe in 15-18, but understanding how hyper complex and connected whole world is can be sometimes quite depressing.
Tax it. Do a carbon tax too while we are at it.
So we pay more for tires, the pollution keeps happening, and the extra money is used for virtue signaling with minimal change?
> So we pay more for tires, the pollution keeps happening, and the extra money is used for virtue signaling with minimal change?
It's often used to promote change, see Canada for instance where the money goes back to citizens et al: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
Norway taxes ICE cars extremely highly (more performance meant more tax), EVs don't have this tax, so people who liked performance loved EVs.. Result: >80% of new cars are EVs...
But oh, just "virtue signalling!". Why should anyone do anything without consulting the genius know-it-all that is hereme888?
There will be less pollution if polluting costs more
No, investing in healthier tires becomes economically viable.
What does “healthier tire” mean and how will the taxman know which tire is healthier and which one is not?
You start out by measuring tires with some metric, like "pounds of of particulate released pe 50,000 miles when loaded at x", and tax tires with a worse rating higher. Them you're gonna have to keep an eye on additives to tires, because it's always possible someone will find something that makes tires wear slower but the particles more toxic.
It's not impossible.
I believe tire dust is about 40% plastics so add that the microplastics bin + the other stuff off of it.
Last time this came up, the story was about plastics in the ocean, and following the links on the story was specifically challenging how much tires contribute. Such that I'd love to see any more sources on this.
To be clear, it is a plausible sounding claim. I'm just growing nervous accepting plausible things.
Brake dust is comparable to tyre dust BTW:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...
Drum brakes can capture this dust for safe disposal, but are seen as old fashioned and for poor people.
The interwebs say that disc brakes are better able to dissipate heat, provide more consistent braking performance, and generally reduce stopping distance.
Drum brakes are old fashioned, most US vehicles switched to at least disc brakes in the front in the late 1970s and early 80s. Drums in the rear make the parking brake simple, and rear brake performance is less important as more braking force comes from the front.
I don't know about being "for poor people", except that poor people may be more likely to have older vehicles, but I don't know that that extends to using vehicles that old, most vehicles with drums are 40+ years old at this point, and keeping something that old alive starts to get spendy because parts are trickier to find, and it costs time or money or both to adapt parts from other vehicles (like upgrading to disc brakes from a newer car)
Note that some cars have parking/emergency brakes as drum brakes in the center of a rotor that provides disc brakes for the service (“normal”) brakes, so you can still get disc braking performance with the parking brake cable mechanism.
Drum brakes are also slightly more efficient, with the shoes exhibiting less drag when not applied, which is important on small battery EVs. (They are worse for high-energy or repeated braking, but better in cruise.)
Some modern EVs already use drum brakes on the rear. Since they have regenerative breaking you don't get brake fade on long downhills.
New EU regulations are coming in to limit brake dust and so people are looking at them again. And other ideas, like mercedes has a prototype that puts the brake inside the motor.
This is not true. Drum brakes are not sealed.
They are not sealed perfectly, but every drum that I’ve removed had a pile of shoe dust that was a very significant fraction of the original mass of the shoe friction material worn. I’d estimate that 50% or more of the material ends up at the workshop instead of along the roadside.
Regenerative braking converts 90% of braking from pad on rotor to running an electrical generator.
If it costs more to replace degraded magnets or motors every million miles compared to brake pads, it will raise the cost of transportation. It's also not feasible to use in ICE vehicles - once you've filled your battery, the only place for that energy to go is heat.
It's not just a tradeoff between ICE and electric, or drum vs pad brakes, or rubber additive A vs B. It's a complex ecosystem upon which people's lives and livelihoods are dependent, with unpredictable and chaotic relationships.
The naive view is to simply replace the apparently "bad" material in tire dust, but if that raises the cost of transportation, food prices go up, quality of life goes down, nutrition suffers, and possible downstream effects end up causing more harm than good.
This isn't to say we shouldn't bother, just that a superficial approach targeted at a single issue could end up doing a lot of unintended damage, and there's no bounded scale of harm. Trying to reduce cancer rates by .0001% might end up reducing average lifespan by a decade, or some other consequence that's orders of magnitude more impactful than the thing being "fixed".
We live in a complex and dynamic system; the supply chain sits at the base of it all. We benefit from the economies of scale serving the supply chain, so we have access to cheap vehicles, efficient and cheap long haul trucks give us access to food and products. Tinker with that too aggressively and people can die.
The best route toward action on things like this are cultural - educate individuals and make alternatives available. People can adjust at their own convenience, and the trend of markets will resolve on a balance between health and safety risks and convenience.
You could simply ban private cars, and presumably 35k fewer deaths would occur each year in the US, and we could work on monolithic solutions to things like brake dust and tire dust. We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms. We need to find where the balance is between the potential harms of these dusts and how much we're willing to give up in mitigating those harms.
Anyway - it's not a trivial exercise, it's a microcosm of the global economy, with surprising complexity and dependencies at every level.
>We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms
Speak for yourself. At least in cities, cars and car-centric cities have absolutely destroyed our economies. People drive for trip less than a mile because walking is miserable, and walking is miserable because the city is built around driving and without regard for pedestrians needing to constantly cross major intersections.
To be fair, cars aren't the root problem here - the root problem is the hypertrophic cities craze that started in the 1780s that made streets so cavernous and muddy (with incredibly wide streets, the middle was often left unpaved to save money, since there was plenty of room on the side to walk) and miserable that cars were a genuine improvement.
( A Traditional City Primer: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php )
That link doesn't cover the history of hypertrophic cities, but it demonstrates quite well how terrible modern streets are.
Here's the thing that makes tire dust and lead different: at least we get some measurable value from the tires. You can argue that our transportation system is wasteful, that we can use better means and modes, smaller vehicles and tires, but it remains true that we get non-zero benefit from the process any way you look at it.
In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels.
> In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels.
That's not true. The benefit was anti-knocking without using more expensive high-octane fuel (or later, ethanol).
It was still a terrible, terrible decision though, given the centuries of knowledge that lead is a poison.
Ethanol was a choice at the time. The fuel companies didn't like the idea of putting what was essentially a competing fuel in their fuel to make it work better and went with the known poison instead.
Ethanol has its own downsides.
When thinking about the explanations, keep in mind that leaded gas adoption was near-universal, including economies where "companies" or "competing fuel" weren't really a thing in that sense - e.g. USSR. They still went for leaded gas because of its objective benefits.
And even today, we still use leaded gas for aviation...
It is a horrible trade-off either way, but it was not done for no gain at all.
I'm sure there can be many mitigation approaches that could reduce tire dust exposure by an order of magnitude if regulated. Vehicle weight limits in high density residential areas, plastic mix % in tires, toxic chemical limits in tires, etc.
> smaller vehicles and tires
That's the easy model where you basically know what you are doing is wrong but you like it so you decide to do less of it. The net result is still positive.
An alternative approach is to try to actually innovate and/or invest in means of transport that don't require tyres nor friction for braking (e.g. eddy current brakes).
Sure there was - lead in fuel increased fuel economy/engine performance.
Didn't (early) engines run significantly better with it? Less knocking, if nothing else?
That was the stated rationale, anyway. It was an anti-knock compound. So, was that false? Did it not help knocking at all? Or was reducing knocking not a benefit at all?
You also have to consider alternatives. Ethanol was skipped because it was more expensive, and then we circled back around once we realized that we were contaminating ground water with MTBE.
[delayed]
Consider this study next time someone says "don't worry, the amount of our chemical in the product is minimal, well below the 'toxic threshhold', and safe to the environment."
Novec is the latest one I can recall, now being discontinued due to environmental and health hazards of forever chemicals.
One day we'll find out just how toxic the effects of trace pharmaceuticals in the environment, food, and water supply have been.
This leads to a serious epistemic crisis where if we are all rational then we all must endeavor to understand that we know nothing about these things. Think about Wi-Fi. You're now going to have to empathize directly with all the people that don't understand it. Since we can't know everything and we can't trust anyone, we must resign to knowing nothing about any of this in general. Best to err on the side of caution though, since now the chance of something being terrible for us is 50/50.
I'm not sure I follow you.
The history of poorly-vetted (or "biasly-vetted") chemicals and trace pharmaceuticals is long and well established. I'm just advocating to advocate for your own health above trusting corporate statements further refined by a marketing team.
I wrote hastily but I said a couple of different things. I meant first that we should not presume to know that the corporate statements are true or false, but at the same time err on the side of caution due to the long and well established track record that you refer to. We can't assume they're dangerous or not dangerous, since we can't really know unless we're an expert in that particular domain, but we won't be experts in all domains relevant to our health, so it makes sense to remain neutrally skeptical while being more risk averse here. Then I was saying that this forces us to empathize with the people who think 5G and Wi-Fi are going to kill them due because they don't understand physics. Their claims are too strong, but their risk aversion due to their ignorance isn't and now we can relate. Do you get what I mean?
Title taken from a Gizmodo article discussing the study as the study's title itself was too long for Hacker New.
https://gizmodo.com/lead-exposure-drove-a-hidden-mental-heal...
If you ask me the the lead poisoning stare is real.
"Lead poisoning stare" takes quite morbid meaning for someone from Mexico like myself haha. After all "plata o plomo".
There’s sort of no point in discussing this article since the full text is paywalled. The Gizmodo summary seems to suggest that it’s mostly just a meta review plus some extrapolation: they averaged some studies to find the typical effect on mental health and then multiplied it by all the lead exposure in the country.
I’ll suggest an interesting article to read instead. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate if it’s true but it is a good depiction of where p-hacking and correlation-causation mixups could lead. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead
The guy who invented leaded gas is the original -10x engineer. Poisoned an entire nation, destroyed the ozone layer, and killed himself with a homemade gizmo. Unprecedented performance.
Moved fast and broke himself.
Perhaps it's for the best that he didn't survive. Given his track record, we probably wouldn't have survived whatever he came up with next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. , and a video by Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA (25 min)
There's a great QAA Podcast episode about it.
What homemade gizmo killed him? A quick search online said that he died from a stroke.
It's in the Wikipedia article. It was a device he invented to help himself get out of bed after having been disabled by polio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Breakfast time, Grommit!
Ah. I presumed you were talking about Charles Kettering, who also was one of the developers of leaded gasoline (and Freon).
I have a feeling that exposure to harmful particles to the brain (the full spectrum, low to high harm) is heavily correlated with political preferences, among other believes, it would be controversial even before executing it but I think it could give important insights.
City dwellers do tend to lean left, after all. Really though, beware confounding variables.
what about lead in pipes?
Can I detect if there is lead in the water I drink?
In San Francisco, you just call the city. They'll give you a few bottles to fill, which they will test. I remember that they even came by personally to either deliver or get them. (Or both?)
It's easy to determine if pipes are made of lead if you can access the pipes. It's less easy to determine if they have some residual lead from upstream pipes that's settled into the corrosion layer on the inside of the pipe (and could be released later)
There are testing services and test strips available for testing your water, which works even if you can't access all the pipes on the way between your source and your sink. A testing service will likely check for a list of contaminants and not simply lead, and most likely have better accuracy and precision than test strips you use yourself.
My county water district publishes the monthly report of detected levels of all of the regulated items: https://www.valleywater.org/your-water/water-quality/water-q...
They also say that lead is rarely injected into the water supply from the water supplier or water mains, but usually much closer to the home (eg. “Goosenecks”).
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I'm skeptical. There are far too many other parameters we know to be largely unrelated to lead exposure (e.g. Roe v Wade) that are very difficult to control for. There are too many lead sources—even banned ones—that remain in environments.
Of course, I don't want to dismiss the study. I just want to dismiss jumping to conclusions and overemphasizing one source of change.
Still? You're still skeptical, after all these decades of research & being able to draw direct, 1:1 lines between lead exposure and the health issues it causes?
There's plenty of room for debate on how to fix this problem. The debate on if it's a problem has been dead for decades, if not centuries.
Lead poisoning was written about in Roman times, so you could argue that it's millennia of research. (There's a theory that the fall of the Roman empire was due to lead poisoning - likely from lead-lined aqueducts). However, after the Romans, it wasn't picked up again until the 17th century, so quite plausibly "centuries" of research.
Of course, it used to be relatively easy to avoid lead poisoning (e.g. not using it for water pipes) until we started to pump lots of it into the air around the 1950s.
The Romans didn't need to get it from the water, they directly used it as a flavoring called "sapa." Apparently it was one of the first artificial sweeteners and is actually pretty delicious.
No idea if that's true, but I've heard that's also why the absurd (and terrifying) seeming "children eating paint chips containing lead" is an actual occurrence. Because those lead chips taste sweet.