Lead From Gasoline Blunted the IQ of About Half the U.S. Population, Study Says
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Lead From Gasoline Blunted the IQ of About Half the U.S. Population, Study Says
Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shared this article from NBC News:
Exposure to leaded gasoline lowered the IQ of about half the population of the United States, a new study estimates. The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on people born before 1996 — the year the U.S. banned gas containing lead. Overall, the researchers from Florida State University and Duke University found, childhood lead exposure cost America an estimated 824 million points, or 2.6 points per person on average. Certain cohorts were more affected than others. For people born in the 1960s and the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption was skyrocketing, the IQ loss was estimated to be up to 6 points and for some, more than 7 points. Exposure to it came primarily from inhaling auto exhaust.
"Lead is a neurotoxin, and no amount of it is safe.
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They were already stupid or what's the message here?
How the hell would lead in the air only affect half the population?
The lead wasnâ(TM)t evenly distributed, it was proportional to the amount of auto exhaust being emitted nearby.
Those who didnâ(TM)t live near lots of traffic were exposed to less lead than those who did.
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Well that explains city people.
Same thing wth asthma [nih.gov]. We've know for a long time people who live in cities have higher health incidents than others despite not being as obese. Which shouldn't be a surprise. People living in cities through centuries have had worse health issues than people living outside the city.
And yet, there are those who keep saying we need to cram everyone into cities so cars aren't needed as much. A better solution would be to reduce the population so people could spread out more and not be like rats in cages. More space between people, more open space in general, will lead to better health conditions.
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The further you spread people out, the more you need cars. It's a straightforward scaling problem and easily verifiable empirically.
As with all pollution, if the car pollution is the problem the solution is to tax the pollution and let individuals and markets adapt. Right now we do the opposite by heavily subsidizing car transport and the results are not surprising... people respond to the subsidy and even become dependent on them.-
Or, instead of cramming people into cities, when you spread them out you create zones. Each zone has its own stores to support the area. Everything is close enough that an electric car could be used or, if one prefers, bike to the place. Or even walk if your home is close enough. Sort of a return to malls but spread out.
And I don't mean those tiny communities developers are doing. I mean people have a quarter acre of land for their house. Large enough to spread people and have some privacy, but not so la
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You shouldn't do either thing or anything. People should be free to live wherever and however they choose, and markets should be free to respond to that. If people want to live in apartments or mansions or teepees or whatever, public policy should be neutral and based on what's best for balancing the general welfare. Any kind of utopian vision is fine but we do have to decide how to pay for it. So far nobody has come up with a model that supports economic growth that doesn't involve cities. Even kow density
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Spreading out creates all kinds of pollution causing inefficiencies. Just to go over a small handful of the limitations spreading out means you need more roads, more power infrastructure, more sewage infrastructure, more mass transit for less people and you cant walk anywhere so you have to drive because most things are farther away. More of all these things means more energy expended on them which right now means more pollution from the energy created to power the electric cars, more mining for more road b
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Hmm, but cramming people together means you need high-rise buildings which use ludicrous amounts of concrete which needs ludicrous amounts of energy and heavy trucks to move it which destroy the roads which then need repairing etc.
Plus the housing is cramped and impossible to extend, so you need to move house when circumstances change, you need to pump water miles to flush the toilet because you can't catch rainwater and so on.
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In 10 years I wouldn't be shocked if more than half of cars on the roads were EVs, in 20 years there might be hardly any ICEs on the road (at a certain point the ICE infrastructure collapses and just finding a gas station becomes very inconvenient and expensive).
Which actually changes the policy decisions a bit. If your city doesn't have a big industrial base it might be all EVs and heat pumps in 20 years and the air quality could be surprisingly good.
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Air pollution other than CO2 hasn't been the biggest problem with cars in several decades. The problem at large scale is the cost and inefficiency of subsidized car infrastructure and the economic impact of that inefficiency. The big-picture problem with subsidizing cars is congestion and parking. Both are built by the government and given away at far below their natural costs. When you subsidize car infrastructure without sprawl, you get Boston-style congestion, and with sprawl, you get LA-style congestion
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I don't mean to claim there aren't a bunch of non-exhaust environmental impacts from ICEs that EVs don't fix, just that the exhaust still sucks [howstuffworks.com]. I've gone running on a winter day with a bit of a temperature inversion near a major roadway and the air stinks.
I suspect the sweet spot for city size is probably about 100-500k, denser than that and downtown density starts getting a bit rough, smaller than that and you don't get the diversity needed to support a vibrant economic and cultural scene.
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In 2015 there was a huge leak in a Natural Gas storage facility in LA, so the surrounding schools installed air filters and their test scores shot up [vox.com].
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Reduce the population and spread them out? That is the stupidest thing I ever heard. What are people going to do with their extra space? Grow food so they don't need to waste time and energy bringing it from the shops? Put up windmills so they are less dependent on the grid? And just how do you expect to price young people out of the housing market if there is less competition for the shoddily-built apartments thrown together by rapacious developers? Crazy talk!
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That is hilariously backwards. Spreading people out is what causes car dependence and car dependence is what causes the air pollution problems leading to poor health outcomes. Cramming people into cities is the *solution* not the problem. Mind you it's not the only solution. We could eliminate this absurd practice of insisting people need to travel from their houses into one small couple of square miles all to sit at a desk and do stuff they could literally do anywhere else. That way they could be spread ou
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Unfortunately, poorer neighborhoods in cities suffered the brunt of it. And those born around 1950-1970 probably bore the brunt of it.
Not sure why some here want to "score political points" off of this topic. Wanting to prevent the poisoning of Americans isn't a partisan thing, or at least it should not be.-
inner cities were often full of black people who couldn't afford to leave to the suburbs (and wouldn't be allowed to if they could). Redlining was a thing.
So like just about everything bad in America this disproportionately targeted minority communities, who ironically tended to subsidize those white suburban communities because the extremely low population density of the suburbs meant that there wasn't enough of a tax base to pay for the services they wanted and needed.-
Why wouldn't they be allowed to leave? I get not being able to afford it, but who's telling them they can't?
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Like he said: Redlining.
As in, "we the nice lilly white owners of the banks are going to makeabsolutely certain that there's no home loan available to any blacks who want to move to this nice white suburb, on any terms, period."-
Im sure that happened less and less as time went on. Probably swung the other way for a while with how eagerly banks were embracing predatory lending. But the people you're talking about also aren't buying houses cause they're poor. Not like banks were handing loans out to white "trailer trash".
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...and people who spend a lot of time handling lead bullets in their guns, right?
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Would explain the aggression
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Like the opposite is known for their intelligence, lol
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Yes, it explains why liberals tend to promote a clean environment and use of EVs/Hybrids - IQ protection. They saw what was happening to their conservative neighbors and don't want any part of that dumbing down, lead poisoning stuff.
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You don't really think cities are less polluted right? I remember moving from rural SD to urban CO back in the 90s when I was a young teenager. What blew me away the most was how bad Denver stunk and the brown ring of air on the horizon that you can see contrasting the blue above. Gross. Another thing it reminds me of is my friend job at the hospital. He a histologist. When the get a dirty lung sample in its diagnosed as "smoker/urban living". Except for more extreme cases they can't tell the difference wit
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No, you see it as you approach Denver. It's everywhere from the inside as well. Also, I never saw it ever in all the years I was in CO Springs. A quick Google search will tell you it's from the NOx in the air amongst other pollutants.
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The cities are full of liberals and traffic
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We also keep all the sex and drugs there too.
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I don't want to bother to read the study because I have other things to do with my time. I am curious about what they used as a proxy for auto exhaust exposure.
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Yeah it doesn't feel good when something disproves your confirmation bias.
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The proxy is gasoline consumption.
I'm sure that leaded gasoline was very harmful, but the methodology in this study seems questionable. The oddly specific numbers appear to be pulled out of the air. I'm surprised this passed peer review.
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I am curious about what they used as a proxy for auto exhaust exposure.
The proxy is gasoline consumption.
I'm sure that leaded gasoline was very harmful, but the methodology in this study seems questionable. The oddly specific numbers appear to be pulled out of the air. I'm surprised this passed peer review.
That's pretty flawed unless it was leaded gas consumption. I'm surprised it took that long for the government to actually ban it.
The catalytic converter mandate in 1975 made leaded gasoline useless for cars built after that year, and realistically, any car made after 1972 or so could take unleaded gas without difficulty, so by the mid-1980s, the number of cars on the road that still needed leaded gas was approximately zero except for a few collectible cars that people drove once a year.
Thus, gas stations stopped selling it. There might have been one gas station in an area that still sold it for collectible car enthusiasts up until the early 1990s, but most people knew how to add no-knock additives if needed, and just ran unleaded in those, too.
So if they're still seeing a detectable difference past 1985, I'd be shocked.
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They took so long to formally ban it because, as you say, it was de facto banned in 1975, creating a case of "why bother?"
The reason effects continued is because engines running on TEL laced gasoline emitted it in the form of lead oxide nanoparticles. Huffing it from car exhaust was the worst, but it didn't disappear if not inhaled. The existence of widespread lead contamination was revealed when scientists examining pre- and post-atomic testing lead isotopes, all the way back in the late 40s, discovered-
That seems unlikely. If you look at blood levels plotted against leaded gasoline consumption [pnas.org], blood levels lag behind consumption by only about two years, and the relationship is mostly linear.
Or at least it was linear until about 1990, followed by a long tail. What makes that curious is that most people live in cities, where you'd expect the highest contamination to be, but the long tail didn't start until about the 70% mark, which, if you assume that there's a lot of lingering contamination from gasolin
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Ssh, you are messing up their narrative. For bonus points, tell us all why all college gender bias based studies start in 1972 exactly (which is weird because the data sets all start in 1946)?
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Leaded gas is still used by small aircraft, which typically have much longer service lives than cars. The EPA appears to be concerned with this and looking for solutions. I did not read original article study, but proximity to small airports that these craft operate out of might be a useful proxy as well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleas... [epa.gov]
Many hobbyists also use avgas in cars. Can't speak to the legality of that, it probably varies, but local race tracks or drag s
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