Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.
The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough.
If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.
So, instead, California continues to mostly build single family housing sprawl into natural habitats.
A clear example of environmental regulation hurting the environment and the climate. And of course the affordability of housing.
*I am not going into immense detail here. It is admittedly a bit more complex than this, but this is a reasonable summary
[0] https://youtu.be/TKN7Cl6finE?si=CR4SjVK5_ojk-OKq [1] https://www.planningreport.com/2015/12/21/new-ceqa-study-rev...
One of the biggest problems today is that urban planning has basically evaporated. Local and state governments don't plan towns anymore. Things are left to developers who have no other concern than to run a street off a major road and plop a few houses down, sell, and move on to the next project. No thought is given to traffic or public services or walkability or public transportation. No care is given to integration with existing urban structures. Instead of mixed-use zoning or building houses around a common public space, which are historically the more common and sensible form of urban planning, we end up with car-dependent suburban dead zones, suburban sprawl.
This should be receiving more attention from environmentalists, as urban planning is intimately related to environmental issues.
>Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
I've never said all environmental regulation is good. That would be stupid, but you should have evidence based reasons for wanting to repeal or modify a regulation.
Existing regulation was put in place for a reason and those reasons likely still matter. Even if the regulation is falling short of having unintended consequences.
Getting rid of LNT would allow higher doses to workers, and the way it makes nuclear cheaper is by having less shielding around the reactor.
But if you look at how recent reactors like the AP1000 failed, it's not so much because of the mere quantity of concrete. In fact, one of the big advantages of the AP1000 is that it used a fraction of the concrete and steel of prior designs. The real problem at Vogtle were construction logistics, matching up design to constructible plans, and doing that all in an efficient manner.
The construction process didn't run over budget and over timeline because of environmental regulations, that happened because we don't know how to build big things anymore, in combination with leadership asking for regulatory favors like starting construction before everything has been fully designed, which gave them more rope to hang themselves with.
I don't know the specifics of why France forgot how to build, at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, but I imagine it's a similar tale as in the US. High labor costs, poor logistics, projects dragged out, and having to pay interest on the loan for years and years extra with every delay.
If there's somebody with more specifics on how unnecessary regulation is killing nuclear, I'd love to see it. But after watching attentively and with great interest since ~2005, I've become so disillusioned with nuclear that I doubt we'll ever see it have success in the West again. Factories and manufacturing have seen productivity go through the roof over the past 50 years, while construction productivity is stagnant. Playing to our strengths, and using our very limited construction capacity on building factories rather than building generators, seems far wiser on the macroeconomic scale.
Now the cost of solar and storage are dropping at a rate I doubt nuclear is ever going to make a significant comeback. I'm not opposed to it, but I wonder if the economics will ever be favorable even with regulatory reform.
Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.
That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.
The alternative is not to have no environmental regulation. California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.
Says whom?
California has a huge population. California has a massive water shortage problem. California has wide areas vulnerable to wildfires. California has piles of small ecosystems that are fragile and can be easily wiped out.
Saying California could copy some states like Iowas regulations makes negative sense.
Here's one example: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-02/california-...
I mostly agree with you, but it is worth paying attention to the details.
> But Casa Joaquin’s neighboring, overwhelmingly white homeowners could have used CEQA to demand costly studies and multiple hearings before Berkeley officials.
Important to note that white people are well-represented at UC Berkley too. https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
> More recently, a series of court rulings that culminated last year nearly forced Berkeley to withhold admission of thousands of high school seniors...
Graduating high-school seniors are also known as incoming freshman or legal adults.
> ... because the state’s judges agreed with NIMBY neighborhood groups that population growth is an inherent environmental impact under CEQA.
Ok, let's see how big the UC school system is...
> The University maintains approximately 6,000 buildings enclosing 137 million gross square feet on approximately 30,000 acres across its ten campuses, five medical centers, nine agricultural research and extension centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2017/chapt...
I'm not seeing evidence that protestors were primarily NIMBYs and pesky white homeowners. I can find several articles citing _student_ protests.
> “It’s students who set up People’s Park in the first place, so it’s our place to defend it,” said Athena Davis, a first-year student at UC Berkeley who spoke at the rally. “It’s up to students to reject the idea that our housing needs to come at the price of destroying green space and homes for the marginalized.”
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2021/01/30/protesters-tear-down...
Using land efficiently in walkable places is one of the most environmentally friendly things we can be doing, and supposed "environmentalists" sought to block it using "environmental" rules!
If that's not NIMBYism to you, you have blinders on.
I'm sure there are better examples to illustrate your point
> homes for people to live in
Student housing. Which likely means partially-furnished studios with shared bathrooms and a kitchenette at best. This isn't the useful housing folks are asking for.
That kind of "wait, no, not THAT kind of housing, not HERE" is textbook NIMBYism.
There may have been some student protestors, but the money behind the legal challenges were all wealthy local NIMBYs.
To me, it seems UC wants to bulldoze a park famous for homeless camps and replace it with student housing. Pro-development is trying to cast the UC expansion in the same light as folks asking for affordable housing. But, UC is not providing useful housing for residents of Berkley.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/ceqa-urban-developmen...
In Massachusetts you can't clear shoreline. Specifically, if you buy waterfront property on a pond / lake, you can't clear the shoreline to make a beach in your backyard. You can only use what used to be there before the law was passed. There's even restrictions on building close to shorelines, so if you want to build, you need to find an existing building and renovate.
Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.
That's an opinion I encounter constantly and it's a meme that was manufactured in PR company meeting rooms, right wing think tanks, and neo-classical economists theoretical models of how the world works.
Literally, in the UK you can’t build if there’s a protected bat species in the area.
I just don't like the general attitude that because you can find something to disagree with that environmental regulation as a general rule is bad. It isn't.
There are thousands and thousands of pages of environmental regulations. Obviously people are going to be able to find some things that need to be revisited, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Nothing should be repealed without evidence and in many cases amendments are more prudent than repeals.
I also don't agree on the principle that regulations are "harmful" or "helpful." Rather, you have to define who the regulation harms, and who it helps. For example antitrust enforcement harms shareholders and some employees of very large firms, but it helps many employees and arguably improves the landscape for competition between many smaller firms. So whether a regulation is preferable comes down to values.
In the case of leaded gas, it harms basically everybody, but it helps fuel companies, so it was an easy thing to change.
Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumers at the gas pump.
The way I think about it, the entirety of global civilization is massively, massively subsidizing carbon emission.
[1] https://theclimatecapitalist.com/articles/gas-should-cost-13... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/phildeluna/2024/11/29/will-dire...
But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-...
TEL was patentable, but those patents were long expired before there was a big push to eliminate leaded gas.
It’s really a collective action problem. Nobody wants their gasoline to be more expensive than other companies’. So everyone has the incentive to use the cheapest ingredient. If you ban that ingredient, prices go up. But since everyone's prices will go up, you remove the competitive disadvantage.
In an age of natural rubber components, poorly sealed fuel systems with steel tanks and aluminum carburetors pretty much anything other than ethanol is the "right choice".
And once they ruled out ethanol they settled on lead because it was cheap/profitable. Obviously they chose wrong, they should've picked something more expensive but less terrible.
These weren't cartoon villains with monocles twirling their mustaches. They were normal humans making pragmatic decisions based on the constraints they faced. Without knowing the details people cannot understand what future similar fact patterns may look like.
That said, it should be no surprise to anyone that nobody wants to talk about "well we don't know how bad the harm of leaded exhaust is, we know it's not good, but it's diffuse and undefined so we'll round it to zero/negligible" type decision making, for that sort of unknown rounds to zero logic underpins in whole or part all manner of modern policy discourse.
We already knew lead was toxic before we started putting it in gasoline. Even the guy that invented it got sick from exposure and people died from exposure in their plants in the first years of operation. The problem is that we somehow require evidence that something is unsafe but don't require any evidence that its safe in the first place.
In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).
Think pesticides and genetically modified plants for example.
That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.
There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.
Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.
The 'greater good' has arguably PREVENTED much more hurt of people than it has ever hurt. Meanwhile companies have PROVEN time and time again that they WILL hurt people when left to their own devices. In environmental policies. In pay policies. In employment policies. In EVERY aspect possible.
Not to simplify but if you have to make a decision shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?
no.
Imagine I open a auto repair center and I perform oil changes. It would cost me money to have used oil hauled away or I could dump it down the drain. You probably support a requirement that I pay for the service.
I'm sure there are regulations that cause actual harm to small businesses that have little or no value but I wonder what percentage it would be of the total.
which isn't to argue that they shouldn't make sense. or that they should be used to tilt the playing field due to corruption, but on the balance claiming that we are currently overregulated is pretty indefensible.
https://www.science.org/content/article/blow-environment-epa...
Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do not have such clear cut costs and benefits.
For example smoke and soot from combustion or dust particles from tires and brakes.
https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/indoors/air/pmq_a.ht...
Breathing in unhealthy levels of PM2.5 can increase the risk of health problems like heart disease, asthma, and low birth weight. Unhealthy levels can also reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy.
Outdoor sources include vehicle exhaust, burning wood, gas and other fuels, and fires. Particle pollution can also travel long distances from its source; for example from wildfires hundreds of miles away. Outdoor particle pollution levels are more likely to be higher on days with little or no wind or air mixing.
2. Germany or at least the EU can and should impose a carbon fee on imports related to a given nations carbon emissions/reductions.
3. Economically transitioning to renewables is better for a nations economy than continuing to burn fossil fuels anyway. Renewables are cheaper.
Pointing to another bad actor as an excuse to continue to be a bad actor we learn is not a moral position somewhere around 5 years old.
"China and India have the right to industrialize themselves using the same tools Western countries have used. China is leading the world in alternative energy manufacturing making clean energy profitable and India is the 4th largest renewable energy producer."
No qualifiers whatsoever. All environmental regulations are good as far as this person is concerned.
Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.
You're right. Off the top of my head, the stupidest environmental regulation I can think of right now is the banning of plastic straws. It's such a minuscule amount of plastic used compared to the mountains of bags and packaging used in general commerce and industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting our environment. I just believe in evidence-based policy and setting priorities correctly. After all, money, labor, and attention are finite resources.
Prove it.
Which "other" regulations are harmful and what harm are they doing?
In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA.
For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others"
Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health.
I wonder if removing lead would meet the new standard.
This would be a reasonable centrist opinion, if there existed environmental regulations that do more harm than good!
Actually, I do know of one, in California, that does both harm and good and the harmful parts need to be reigned in. CEQA in California was expanded by courts after it was passed to cover all sorts of things that weren't intended by the authors. CEQA is not so much an "environmental" law as it is a "perform some massive studies law" as it doesn't really regulate anything in particular.
Mostly it serves as a route to use the courts to delay projects, largely housing in already-built-out areas. By delaying a project's approval with a court lawsuit for 2-3 years, the preliminary financing runs out, the cost of owning land without doing anything with it runs out, so projects can be scuttled without the validity of the lawsuit every being evaluated by courts.
Instead of this sort of legal courtroom process that takes long and indeterminate amounts of time, CEQA should be replaced with strict and very clear definitions of harm, or at least move the more subjective parts into a science-based regulatory body that provides answers an a short timeline that can not be dragged on indefinitely.
> Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights.
This is a very weird turn of the phrase "corporations aren't people," because there actually are highly influential politicians that made the case that corporations are people. Nobody is saying that regulations are people. That's silly.
The regulations we need to get rid of are not "environmental" regulations, they are "rent seeking" regulations that allow entrenched interests to prevent disruption by smaller interests. CEQA is not a problem because its an environmental regulation, it's a problem because it's a tool NIMBYs use to get results that are worse for the environment.
Here is a strawman for you: studies for regulation A show that it is successfull in improving habitat for endangered species. Studies also show that the regulation increases tax burden and decreases competitiveness of national agriculture.
Should the regulation be chopped?
This sounds good as a general default, but there are differences of approach. The US, for example, tends to be more permissive with new chemicals while the EU tends to take a more precautionary approach. Which is better on the whole, weighing the various competing goods, I don't know. I generally favor health over economic prowess, however.
> a manipulative political maneuver
Yes, under the pretext of concern for the environment. There are well-known cases where the political opposition will commission a bogus ecological studies to stifle construction projects they either don't agree with or as a petty way to simply make the ruling party appear less successful. And naturally, the ecological study will find something, as virtually no major construction project will leave the environment unaltered, which is not to say seriously or irretrievable damaged.
It's like saying that some people are dangerous criminals who need to be locked up, and other people are upstanding citizens who should be free to live their lives. Everybody would agree with this. The disagreement is in how you sort people. What category encompasses someone who belongs to the opposing political party? That sort of thing.
Regulation should definitely be justified by scientific data. Who gets to determine what's enough? Who gets to determine what counts? Leaded gasoline is a great example. It was pretty well understood when it was introduced that lead was hazardous and dumping a bunch of it into the atmosphere was unwise. But this was evaded, denied, and suppressed for decades.
Even today, it's not settled. Lead is still used in aviation gasoline in the US. It's being phased out, but it's been in the process of phasing out for a couple of decades and there seems to be no urgency in it.
You'll find plenty of people disagreeing with pretty clearly beneficial environmental regulations because in their view those regulations are not supported by the data. They would completely agree with your statement, while saying that pollution from coal power plants is no big deal, climate change is a myth, etc.
I'm aware of political parties and politicians who make statements similar to "We have too many regulations" or "stop big government" I'm not aware of opposite.
You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion.
Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.
That wedge surrounded by green is a neighborhood that was created by landfilling a patch of swamp and building a levee around it. The northeast side of the wedge is the "nice" part of the neighborhood. You can see the houses are much bigger and there is a golf course running through it. There's a country club and lot of very nice houses. That's where a lot of upper level oil company employees live. (We lived here, my stepfather was a research chemist at DuPont.)
The southwest side of the neighborhood (much of it literally on "the other side of the tracks") is the cheaper houses and some apartments where a lot of blue collar employees work.
Zoom out a bit and you see Shell Norco to the northwest, the very heart of (and cause of) Cancer Alley. Ormond Estates was basically created to be a commuter neighborhood for Shell. Across the river is Dow Chemical. Look east and you see the IMTT St. Rose chemical plant. Keep going upriver and you get to DuPont and the Marathon Refinery.
Most of the executives responsible for cancer here do live in the area. People of all stripes have an impressive ability to maintain cognitive dissonance and live in denial when they are incentivized to do so.
Southern Louisiana is an intense microcosm of this. Seafood is one of the biggest industries there and you would think the local culture would be intensely protective of the environment, especially after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But environmentalism is woven into liberal culture that is in opposition to the religious conservative culture of the area, so it often gets actively rejected even though poor people in Louisiana are the ones who suffer for their choice.
"Strangers in Their Own Land" is an excellent social science book if you want to know more about the area.
"…played a major role in developing leaded gasoline and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons…; both products were later banned from common use due to their harmful impact on human health and the environment. He was granted more than 100 patents over the course of his career."
As someone else said, this guy's work was so toxic to the planet we ought to ban everything else he ever invented—just in case.
(And weirdly, one of his own machines took his life as well—whether by design or not.)
This is fixing the symptom instead of the problems. Elites are allowed to be rich because the cost of failure is supposed to be extremely (historically, their life) expensive to them. We got rid of the latter without the adjusting the former.
I would almost always take the opposite side of this bet. Once responsibility becomes diffuse enough, people would actively poison themselves as they see no alternative.
You aren't wrong, but let's be honest that a lot of that is manufacturing just moved to China and moved the pollution. Specific to lead in gas, yes it's great we no longer do this.
There's less manufacturing jobs and it's less of the total economy as other sectors grew but it would presumably need to be genuinely cleaner in order to offset that growth if industrial pollution just remained flat.
The switch from coal to gas would be a major cleanup for any process that uses electricity, for example.
Obviously there is an absolutely massive problem that you're missing as you're congratulating yourself on "succeeding" with a massive effort with no clear result.
Last week, a Colorado utility was "respectfully" asking to be able to close a plant:
> TTri-State Generation and partner Platte River Power Authority had a “respectful” but emphatic response late Thursday to the Trump administration ordering them to keep Craig’s Unit 1 coal-fired plant open past the New Year:
> They don’t need it, they don’t want it, and their inflation-strapped consumers can’t afford the higher bills. Plus, the federal order is unconstitutional.
https://coloradosun.com/2026/01/30/craig-tri-state-petition-...
TVA has also been begging to close a money losing coal plant for a while now, writing letters to FERC about it, but I can't find the link now.
New coal is far too expensive to build anymore too. Handling big amounts of solid material is expensive, and big old unresponsive baseload is undesirable for achieving economic efficiency.
Even China, which is still building new coal plants, is lessening their coal usage. Personally I think they'll keep some around to continue economic influence on Australia, which is one their primary countries for experimenting with methods to increase their soft power.
There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.
For anyone wanting a slightly ranty but also informed description of why, I enjoyed this Hank Green video on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms&pp=ygUPaGFuayBnc...
In EU 90% of expenses of running coal plants are taxes, yet it can still compete with subsidized green energy! It would be in everybody best interest, to allow building modern coal plants, to replace toxic inefficient stuff from 1960ties.
But with the overregulated and overtaxes industry, we have the worst from all options.
Replacing existing coal with natural gas is better, cheaper, etc. etc. and it's just downright "dumb" to build coal as explained in a parallel comment that links to youtube.
But even new natural gas is likely to end up as stranded capital. Solar and wind are cheaper already, and backing that with storage, today, is nipping at the cost of most new natural gas plants. And in 3, 5, 10 years? Price trends are going to make even the cheap cost of natural gas as a fuel more expensive than using solar and storage.
I'd be very surprised if 90% of the expense of coal was tax, as that would make taxes 9x higher than fuel. Not surprised because it wouldn't make scientific sense, the negative externalities of coal are massive and any hard-nosed free marketer should be advocating for putting a price on those negative externalities, but surprised because the politics of Europe allow that!
Also, if taxes on coal or >9x the cost of the fuel, wouldn't that start to make natural gas much more cost effective too, even in Europe? Or does natural gas have similar taxes?
A quick look at the PJM interconnect data would disagree with you. About a quarter of the live power is coal.
https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx
That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C).
Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.
We shouldn't get rid of coal without having something to replace it (ideally nuclear/solar/wind, but realistically probably gas), but I think the point was just that nobody would build a new coal plant today or keep them running for longer than they need to. They're inefficient and fairly expensive.
https://www.unep.org/globalmercurypartnership/what-we-do/art...
Total and per capita coal usage for Germany and a few other peer nations:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-per-capi...
I can see a bump in early 1980s but I see the same in other nations, possibly a response to oil embargoes, possibly just economic growth.
>Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–1996) was a pioneering animated series designed by Ted Turner and producer Barbara Pyle as environmental, pro-social "edutainment" to influence children towards ecological activism. It aimed to combat pollution and encourage environmental stewardship, often using over-the-top, stereotypical villains to represent corporate greed and ecological destruction.
Our parents let us get brainwashed by hippies and corporations as kids haha
Well, yes, it isn't subtle.
It turns out that some propaganda is just correct, however.
Strangely enough, I was raised with quite a bit of environmental responsibility, but only a relatively dim awareness of the show existing.
Yes, well the alternative, where the entire media system that might offer a cartoon like Captain Planet is owned by one side, is working out super well and in no way slants anyone's view of anything. Good God, my dad still fights weird battles like this tiny skirmish without ever being able to see the larger picture and how immaterial this is.
(ETA: Not to mention that the biggest takeaways from such shows was that individual action was sometimes more important than corporate or regulatory action, a message itself designed by the oil companies to avoid responsibility. If there was propaganda in those shows, it may not have been the heroes winning, but the idea that all we need are a few magic heroes rather than government regulations.)
The findings, which appear in PNAS, underscore the vital role of environmental regulations in protecting public health.
The study notes lead rules are now being weakened by the Trump administration in a wide-ranging move to ease environmental protections.
“We should not forget the lessons of history. And the lesson is those regulations have been very important,”And....it worked pretty much exactly as designed - initially only the largest stations carried it because they could justify the storage costs, and eventually it disappeared from almost everywhere. Just before covid there were still 3 small garages selling leaded petrol by the drum, but afaik they all stopped doing so.
And regardless - you can stil buy actual real Tetraethyl Lead fuel additive which turns your petrol into actual real 4-star leaded petrol, just like in the old days:
https://www.demon-tweeks.com/tetraboost-e-guard-15-fuel-addi...
Aviation gasoline is probably the one market that still keeps it afloat, when/if piston aviation switches over the remaining market is small and insignificant.
Sounds like the government is being lax. From the aircraft owners and pilots association:
>So the Government's indifference is not going to help us in the UK if the *supply of leaded AVGAS is stopped, the UK CAA have not appoved new fuels, there is no infrastucture or supply chain in the UK. We keep beating the doors at the CAA and DfT...
When I go to the range, every once in a while, I'll see one of the older marksmen who's there with his squirrel hunting rifle, chambered in .22 LR. I've noticed that he seems to have a tremor in his hands when he's loading his magazines. Essential tremor is linked to lead exposure [0]
Most .22 LR projectiles are either just lead or have a copper "wash" over the lead, not a proper jacket like you see on other rounds.
I wonder, if you shoot those loads for long enough, and breathe in enough gunsmoke, do you get that problem?
As for the proof being in our hair... well, not mine. Chrome dome over here XD
Copper, polymer-coated, or total metal jacket rounds will also result in less lead on the firearm, I'd think, and less on the user's hands. One old guy I know who had lead poisoning at one time believes the real risk is getting the lead on one's hands and then handling a cigarette.
Particularly for unjacketed bullets like 22LR. Even jacketed bullets tend to not be jacketed at the base.
With rounds that aren't well jacketed like those 22s that are just bare lead, you also get some of the round scraping in the barrels that comes off as dust.
There's tons of lead in the air at shooting ranges.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sugar-of-lead-a-...
https://petroleumservicecompany.com/sunoco-supreme-112-octan...
I think they only sell the unleaded race gas at the pumps now but I may be wrong.
Definitively interesting that they could get so many old hair samples with good provenance.
then lead is being sprayed all over you, your car and home, daily
for THREE DECADES NOW
no rush, not like it's poison or does permanent damage to your health/IQ
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
I guess people who have money for personal airplanes also have the money to lobby when it matters for their interests. Pricks, I hope they die of dementia.
California has a few airports that are stocking the lead-free alternatives, but that's about it.
But yes, blame the small aircraft owners if it makes you feel better.
> "piston engine aircraft carry virtually no vital role in anything except people flying them for fun"
I guess we just shouldn't train new pilots then.
https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-sha...
The thing is - it's simply not as good. The worst case is probably frying frozen gyoza. They will get stuck when they get gelatinous on that 'ceramic' surface.
I ended up looking up some slightly offbrand stores to get the pan that I wanted.
I still like non-stick pans for eggs, but for almost everything else, I prefer stainless steel, cast iron, or enameled cast iron. You do have to pay a little more attention to technique (knowing what temperature to heat the pan to before you put food on, etc.), but the end result is just about as good as a non-stick pan with many advantages:
* You don't have to be obsessive about never letting a metal utensil scratch the pan. (I hope you aren't using a metal spatula or fork with your non-stick!)
* You can scrape the hell out of the pan while you cook and get all that delicious crispy fond into what you're making. If I'm doing a pan sauce, it's always in the Dutch oven so I can get that fond into the gravy.
* They last a lot longer. Even if you are careful, a non-stick pan will lose its coating and need to be replaced after a handful of years. I got my cast iron skillet for $15 at an antique store. It's older than me and will outlive me.
* You're not, you know, eating forever chemicals.
This ceramic pan I bought from IKEA lasted like 3-5 months until I was unhappy with it. Historically, the teflon pans I have bought from there have lasted 12-18 months easily.
don't really know what takeaway I'm supposed to know about
If that’s even what their comment was about
How does that effect work?
your assumption wasn’t a “lead free” response, am I doing it right?