You are correct, but since some may read that and assume that all aviation fuel is leaded, I wanted to add more info.
Most people don’t know that “airplane fuel” and “jet fuel” are different. Jet fuel is not leaded. The fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is. Because small piston aircraft still use leaded fuel, aviation is still the largest source of airborne lead emissions. The FAA is working to phase it out by 2030.
You know what’s funny? One of the “quirky” things about the Fallout Universe is how everything is radioactive because all their tech is based on fission/fusion right? It’s meant to be funny like haha yeah our pollution is bad but atleast we’re not poisoning ourselves with everything we do. Yet if you sub out “radioactive” for “heavy metal contamination” and “microplastics” etc that’s basically 100% accurate to real life america.
Iirc locations downwind or under approach/depart flight lanes of small airports deal with an exposure risk fairly above baseline. I feel like I remember reading then that it ties into modern redlining where there are more minority populations in those areas due to cost of housing and the generational impacts of lead exposure.
Just flew with 100LL, and I also clean up with anti-lead soap. I’m the only pilot I know who does this, but I can’t wait to fly something electric ugh.
The danger from leaded fuels don’t come from handling, but from the exhaust. The lead becomes breathable and enters the environment, exposing those who lived in urban areas and near roads to more lead than others.
The other poster isn’t wrong about airplane fuel being leaded, but that can be misleading because most people don’t know that “airplane fuel” and “jet fuel” are different. Jet fuel is not leaded, but the fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is.
Yeah but the jet stream takes care of any concerning concentrations of exhaust.
Even under 10,000 ft the atmospheric dispersion is orders of magnitude above surface.
The turbulence at the surface on a bad day can ‘lock out’ the upper atmosphere sometimes, which is extra dangerous for surface car exhaust - but is actually beneficial the higher your altitude vs ground.
So in all ways the ways airplane fuel would expose someone to lead, isnt experienced by the general populace. (minus directly handling the fuel, may have concentrated lead get on someone’s hand/food, but thats another situation)
Does the lead in the exhaust come down into the air we breathe? Lead is heavy. Would probably be more in cities with airports and under flight paths. Diluted of course, but repeated every day… Perhaps a tin hat or mask would help.
Atmospheric dispersion is usually actually concerning good not bad, so it should dilute across the globe fairly quickly.
Air pollution usually becomes an issue when something like nuclear waste reaches the atmosphere, cause we ALL get to breathe in that nuclear waste.
But honestly some (probably large) percentage of meteors are lead deposited right to the atmosphere, cause its so atomically stable nearly everything decays to it.
So no matter what there’s some lead in the soup, and I can’t see jet fuel being a large contributer (to an already small amount)
lol no. Lead in the atmosphere is a problem, because if it’s in the atmosphere, you are breathing it. Remember that next time you see a gas plant spewing out exhaust.
Nuclear power plants will not exhaust anything except water vapor unless things go terribly wrong. Things going terribly wrong basically cannot release radiation with modern designs unless you were to bomb the core directly, with large bombs to defeat the containment building and massive amounts of stuff surrounding them…
Fossil fuels are infinitely worse for everyone than nuclear, with or without lead.
Well jet exhaust would be a very large contributor if it were leaded, but luckily it isn’t. It’s just piston powered prop planes that use leaded “avgas”, anything with a turbine uses an unleaded jet fuel.
As it is, it’s pretty bad, but it could be a lot worse. Airborne lead is really quite bad for many aspects of biology. If small planes stopped burning leaded fuel today, I’m quite sure we would be able to track a measurable difference in health and educational outcomes within a decade.
Thats a good point, not even turboprops are leaded if I remember right.
Obviously it’d require a lot of study to definitively say the impact of the lead, but I’m convinced the impact wouldn’t be able to compare to natural levels in that atmospheric environment. Like we love our planes, but its still energetically really difficult for us to get them up there - but space rocks can have a hard time NOT burning up in our atmosphere. And lead is a larger than uniform part of our universe because its atomic stability, so odds are (IMO) atmospheres relatively lead-y, but have been for centuries.
That and the difficulty creating hotspots in such a turbulent environment makes it required to increase the entire atmosphere’s lead content to increase any one area to dangerous levels.
Well honestly, I have to admit, I’d never previously considered the amount of lead added to the atmosphere by meteors. But considering it now… only about 6% of meteors are the metallic variety. I had to look up what the average chemical makeup of these is like, but it appears that they’re mostly iron and nickel, with lead making up a small percentage of the remainder, probably less than 1%. So all and all, it doesn’t seem like they actually deposit all that much lead.
Conversely, the connection between the use of leaded gasoline and lead levels in the environment is really very well documented and clear. We know that eliminating it from standard gasoline has made a profound difference. The volume of exhaust from small planes is of course dwarfed by the volume from cars and trucks, so the damage that’s still occurring is significantly less, but it’s still meaningful.
So… I don’t have any solid data for you here, but my intuition is that a handful of meteors probably can’t add close to as much lead to the atmosphere as millions of vehicles burning leaded gas.
Effective January 1, 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the sale of the small amount of leaded fuel that was still available in some parts of the country for use in on-road vehicles.
IIRC farm co-ops, rural gas stations, bulk purchases for fleets, etc…
I can remember my grandpa, a career trucker and grease monkey, grumbling about having to use lead substitute in his 60s Ford pickup when I was very young.
We had one gas station in my town in Oklahoma that sold it right up to the deadline. I used it because both my vehicles were built for it.
Cars made before the 70s need the extra lubrication in the valves or the engines wear out much quicker. Engines made for unleaded fuel usually have valve sleeves to prevent excessive wear.
The Boomers grew up with EVERYTHING having lead in it, including the air thanks to leaded gasoline. Prolonged lead poisoning is almost surely a factor there.
Eh, Gen-z who are chuds do of course hold responsibility for their own actions, but they were started down the path by really hard to overcome disadvantages previous generations had where family was present to socialize them, teach them how to treat others, previous generations had third spaces to socialize with peers to learn how not to be asshats, to learn what behaviors wouldn’t be tolerated, and the silent generation, boomers, and now gen-x (my gen) ARE guilty of one by one letting or actively helping all the structures that made socialization and generationally passed down behavioral guidance possible go away or be stripped by stopping the flow of corporate gains to the lower and middle classes, forcing families to all work, and sometimes all work multiple jobs, they voted against social programs, against traditional funding that built transportation systems, parks, and other third spaces by reducing taxation on the wealthy in the name of lowering taxes and the Ayn Rand myth of extreme self reliance.
When you stop investing in society, you stop getting the benefits of a society, and the first to go is the social contract, where people treat each other with some level of respect due to acknowledgement of said social contract, for the most part.
This might be true if the investment in society, infrastructure and lower classes always had been the same or same direction. After wwii it changed drastically and in favor of the working class and those in need, and society benefited greatly from it, there’s datapoints to show this to be true. Then there was a backlash from the wealthy to all the civil rights movements, labor movements and those investments were pulled back strategically. This is new, because it isn’t a continual trend over time, but that pull back has continued from the 1970s to today’s date.
I’m not sure that’s as wide of an issue compared to lead being in the gas tank. Then again I don’t know if there were ever studies on fallout from such tests on USA soil.
This just proves that broader economic trends exist, but especially cause how much it detaches at the end, yet increases in step this is obviously not causation, and is really only loose correlation
Children age out of the sample cohort, but still have high lead levels and still contribute to the crime cohort.
I’d expect to see the lead level rate be proportional to the birth rate and the crime rate proportional to the death rate. Having the chart extend another 15 years to today might show that.
That’s incorrect. It’s correlation, not causation.
If lead were such a direct cause of violence, they should start diverging at the introduction of lead, not long after a notable decline in lead levels. (ok ok not diverge at first, but still have a predictable, visible connection throughout)
Children grow up constantly, and only one of the lines is not age-restricted. If it were to ever diverge while still being a major cause, it’d begin to diverge at the introduction of the stimulus… or rather, start to diverge when the supposed initiating cause was reduced.
As you say, lead is a lifetime problem. If it were to be a tent pole contributor to violence, violence wouldn’t have reduced in lockstep basically ever.
Lead is a massive problem and is a toxin, but it surely did not itself contribute to increased violence. Increased stupidity? Absolutely.
I have been pointing this out for like 20 years. Even with good sanitation and PPE, lead residue from shooting is surprisingly hard tocompletely eliminate. I was as shooting maybe a couple of times per week, primarily with a bolt action rifle and shotgun, wearing gloves, wiping things down, and I could still find detectable lead residue on my range bag, and in my car (!).
Someone who is putting hundreds of rounds per week of dog shit ammo through their AR is 1000% exposing themselves and their family to a slowly increasing background supply of lead.
Someone on Lemmy wrote, a little over a year ago I think, that lead ossifies in the bones and then gets released into the blood as bones soften with age. This then affects the brain and might explain why older people have seemingly sudden personality changes. I think about this often.
There’s some studies that look into this and its effects on mental health of all stripes. I’m certain in the coming decades there’ll be more as the boomers start suffering and dying.
The “Super gun owners” account for only like 3% of Americans. And a lot of those still don’t shoot enough to meaningfully manifest the symptoms of lead poisoning on its own.
It’s probably just medical advances letting bitter racist old fucks live longer.
And the paint, don’t forget the leaded paint. And the ceramic tile. And cosmetics. And costume jewelry. And pipes/plumbing. And pottery. And older vinyl, like blinds. And almost all older strained glass uses lead to hold the panels together. And even older plastics often contained lead to soften the material, and we all know how badly old plastic often deteriorates.
There’s a shit ton of lead in products made before the turn of the century.
Well there’s on going studies that lead poisoning/exposure leads to mental degredation in various ways, including parkinson’s/alheimer’s and similar neurological diseases.
Leaded gas was prominent in the US until it was phased out ~1980-90s. I’ve always wonder if this had a large effect on those growing up in earlier times, i.e. those in their 60-70s now, or the baby boomer generation.
They might have grown up in a household with an active gun owner, which, when combined with bad hygiene practices after shooting, might cause lead to cause developmental effects.
Is it possible the political divide in this country is people with lead poisoning vs. those without it?
Bruh they put lead in gasoline until the 80s.
MAGA is 10% nazis, 10% cult members, 10% painfully-ignorant cunts, 69% lead addled boomers/genx
and 1% rich fucks manipulating the rest of them.
airplane fuel is still leaded.
You are correct, but since some may read that and assume that all aviation fuel is leaded, I wanted to add more info.
Most people don’t know that “airplane fuel” and “jet fuel” are different. Jet fuel is not leaded. The fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is. Because small piston aircraft still use leaded fuel, aviation is still the largest source of airborne lead emissions. The FAA is working to phase it out by 2030.
You know what’s funny? One of the “quirky” things about the Fallout Universe is how everything is radioactive because all their tech is based on fission/fusion right? It’s meant to be funny like haha yeah our pollution is bad but atleast we’re not poisoning ourselves with everything we do. Yet if you sub out “radioactive” for “heavy metal contamination” and “microplastics” etc that’s basically 100% accurate to real life america.
Iirc locations downwind or under approach/depart flight lanes of small airports deal with an exposure risk fairly above baseline. I feel like I remember reading then that it ties into modern redlining where there are more minority populations in those areas due to cost of housing and the generational impacts of lead exposure.
huh. maybe the chemtrail people were onto something.
I’ve known a few that were certainly on something…
Just flew with 100LL, and I also clean up with anti-lead soap. I’m the only pilot I know who does this, but I can’t wait to fly something electric ugh.
The politics and logistics issues holding back lead free avgas are extremely frustrating. I really thought we would have seen that transition by now.
Who knows, maybe it will take electric aircraft to finally put an end to the issue.
Maybe you can pull it off WW2 style by adding a couple % of aniline to unleaded gasoline
Isn’t it just for some prop planes? Also there’s an approved unleaded version but for slme reason it’s being rolled out slowly
Jets run on kerosene but higher quality, so yes, the leaded fuel is small prop planes
So is most racing fuel.
Most people don’t handle airplane fuel
The danger from leaded fuels don’t come from handling, but from the exhaust. The lead becomes breathable and enters the environment, exposing those who lived in urban areas and near roads to more lead than others.
The other poster isn’t wrong about airplane fuel being leaded, but that can be misleading because most people don’t know that “airplane fuel” and “jet fuel” are different. Jet fuel is not leaded, but the fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is.
Yeah but the jet stream takes care of any concerning concentrations of exhaust.
Even under 10,000 ft the atmospheric dispersion is orders of magnitude above surface.
The turbulence at the surface on a bad day can ‘lock out’ the upper atmosphere sometimes, which is extra dangerous for surface car exhaust - but is actually beneficial the higher your altitude vs ground.
So in all ways the ways airplane fuel would expose someone to lead, isnt experienced by the general populace. (minus directly handling the fuel, may have concentrated lead get on someone’s hand/food, but thats another situation)
I can’t handle it. I get drunk immediately.
Does the lead in the exhaust come down into the air we breathe? Lead is heavy. Would probably be more in cities with airports and under flight paths. Diluted of course, but repeated every day… Perhaps a tin hat or mask would help.
Yes, but jet fuel isn’t leaded. Leaded avgas is by far the minority, unless you live right next a busy small airport.
Atmospheric dispersion is usually actually concerning good not bad, so it should dilute across the globe fairly quickly.
Air pollution usually becomes an issue when something like nuclear waste reaches the atmosphere, cause we ALL get to breathe in that nuclear waste.
But honestly some (probably large) percentage of meteors are lead deposited right to the atmosphere, cause its so atomically stable nearly everything decays to it.
So no matter what there’s some lead in the soup, and I can’t see jet fuel being a large contributer (to an already small amount)
lol no. Lead in the atmosphere is a problem, because if it’s in the atmosphere, you are breathing it. Remember that next time you see a gas plant spewing out exhaust.
Nuclear power plants will not exhaust anything except water vapor unless things go terribly wrong. Things going terribly wrong basically cannot release radiation with modern designs unless you were to bomb the core directly, with large bombs to defeat the containment building and massive amounts of stuff surrounding them…
Fossil fuels are infinitely worse for everyone than nuclear, with or without lead.
Well jet exhaust would be a very large contributor if it were leaded, but luckily it isn’t. It’s just piston powered prop planes that use leaded “avgas”, anything with a turbine uses an unleaded jet fuel.
As it is, it’s pretty bad, but it could be a lot worse. Airborne lead is really quite bad for many aspects of biology. If small planes stopped burning leaded fuel today, I’m quite sure we would be able to track a measurable difference in health and educational outcomes within a decade.
Thats a good point, not even turboprops are leaded if I remember right.
Obviously it’d require a lot of study to definitively say the impact of the lead, but I’m convinced the impact wouldn’t be able to compare to natural levels in that atmospheric environment. Like we love our planes, but its still energetically really difficult for us to get them up there - but space rocks can have a hard time NOT burning up in our atmosphere. And lead is a larger than uniform part of our universe because its atomic stability, so odds are (IMO) atmospheres relatively lead-y, but have been for centuries.
That and the difficulty creating hotspots in such a turbulent environment makes it required to increase the entire atmosphere’s lead content to increase any one area to dangerous levels.
Well honestly, I have to admit, I’d never previously considered the amount of lead added to the atmosphere by meteors. But considering it now… only about 6% of meteors are the metallic variety. I had to look up what the average chemical makeup of these is like, but it appears that they’re mostly iron and nickel, with lead making up a small percentage of the remainder, probably less than 1%. So all and all, it doesn’t seem like they actually deposit all that much lead.
Conversely, the connection between the use of leaded gasoline and lead levels in the environment is really very well documented and clear. We know that eliminating it from standard gasoline has made a profound difference. The volume of exhaust from small planes is of course dwarfed by the volume from cars and trucks, so the damage that’s still occurring is significantly less, but it’s still meaningful.
So… I don’t have any solid data for you here, but my intuition is that a handful of meteors probably can’t add close to as much lead to the atmosphere as millions of vehicles burning leaded gas.
Yep, they literally used leaded gasoline to wash off their hands in the 70s. Nevermind the exhausts blanketing everything with it.
1996 in the US.
Where were these places?
IIRC farm co-ops, rural gas stations, bulk purchases for fleets, etc…
I can remember my grandpa, a career trucker and grease monkey, grumbling about having to use lead substitute in his 60s Ford pickup when I was very young.
We had one gas station in my town in Oklahoma that sold it right up to the deadline. I used it because both my vehicles were built for it.
Cars made before the 70s need the extra lubrication in the valves or the engines wear out much quicker. Engines made for unleaded fuel usually have valve sleeves to prevent excessive wear.
I hate that Gen-X is represented here.
The Boomers grew up with EVERYTHING having lead in it, including the air thanks to leaded gasoline. Prolonged lead poisoning is almost surely a factor there.
Can’t blame boomers for the number of Gen-Z males who are absolute chuds.
The voting break in males over 65 is more liberal than those under 25.
Eh, Gen-z who are chuds do of course hold responsibility for their own actions, but they were started down the path by really hard to overcome disadvantages previous generations had where family was present to socialize them, teach them how to treat others, previous generations had third spaces to socialize with peers to learn how not to be asshats, to learn what behaviors wouldn’t be tolerated, and the silent generation, boomers, and now gen-x (my gen) ARE guilty of one by one letting or actively helping all the structures that made socialization and generationally passed down behavioral guidance possible go away or be stripped by stopping the flow of corporate gains to the lower and middle classes, forcing families to all work, and sometimes all work multiple jobs, they voted against social programs, against traditional funding that built transportation systems, parks, and other third spaces by reducing taxation on the wealthy in the name of lowering taxes and the Ayn Rand myth of extreme self reliance.
When you stop investing in society, you stop getting the benefits of a society, and the first to go is the social contract, where people treat each other with some level of respect due to acknowledgement of said social contract, for the most part.
You just described each generations qualms with what the generations before them left them.
This might be true if the investment in society, infrastructure and lower classes always had been the same or same direction. After wwii it changed drastically and in favor of the working class and those in need, and society benefited greatly from it, there’s datapoints to show this to be true. Then there was a backlash from the wealthy to all the civil rights movements, labor movements and those investments were pulled back strategically. This is new, because it isn’t a continual trend over time, but that pull back has continued from the 1970s to today’s date.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, in either comment.
Just know that every generation has had the capacity to point at the things that were done because the data exists and the lived experience exists.
Just wait till we discover the novel and fun ways our generations fuck over the earth.
Well at least these generations will have the excuse of real scarcity and hoarding by the ultra wealthy that are armed with ai murderbots. That’s fun.
But we can blame lead poisoning from poorly-soldered vape batteries
You can blame them for being in positions of power that can be taken advantage of due to the brain damage.
Also radioactive fallout from nuclear testing (over 1000 nuclear devices in the US) during their early development
I’m not sure that’s as wide of an issue compared to lead being in the gas tank. Then again I don’t know if there were ever studies on fallout from such tests on USA soil.
I’d like to see this graphed against political leaning and opinions on things like gay rights or abortion.
This just proves that broader economic trends exist, but especially cause how much it detaches at the end, yet increases in step this is obviously not causation, and is really only loose correlation
The divergence makes sense.
Children age out of the sample cohort, but still have high lead levels and still contribute to the crime cohort.
I’d expect to see the lead level rate be proportional to the birth rate and the crime rate proportional to the death rate. Having the chart extend another 15 years to today might show that.
No idea on lead level, but violent crime has mostly stayed fairly level now, property crime is way down. Something to consider is that rapes are up quite a bit, starting around the time #MeToo went viral. Which IMO makes sense, as more women found the courage to speak out.
Thats a good point, I always get messed up on small aspects of statistics like that
That’s incorrect. It’s correlation, not causation.
If lead were such a direct cause of violence, they should start diverging at the introduction of lead, not long after a notable decline in lead levels. (ok ok not diverge at first, but still have a predictable, visible connection throughout)
Children grow up constantly, and only one of the lines is not age-restricted. If it were to ever diverge while still being a major cause, it’d begin to diverge
at the introduction of the stimulus…or rather, start to diverge when the supposed initiating cause was reduced.As you say, lead is a lifetime problem. If it were to be a tent pole contributor to violence, violence wouldn’t have reduced in lockstep basically ever.
Lead is a massive problem and is a toxin, but it surely did not itself contribute to increased violence. Increased stupidity? Absolutely.
Lead is a neurotoxin. Its link to violence is not in question by any serious statistical analysis.
Leave apologia at the door please.
Perhaps the preschoolers who were exposed to lead, who then went on to become violent 20-somethings, continued to be more violent in their 30s.
I have been pointing this out for like 20 years. Even with good sanitation and PPE, lead residue from shooting is surprisingly hard tocompletely eliminate. I was as shooting maybe a couple of times per week, primarily with a bolt action rifle and shotgun, wearing gloves, wiping things down, and I could still find detectable lead residue on my range bag, and in my car (!).
Someone who is putting hundreds of rounds per week of dog shit ammo through their AR is 1000% exposing themselves and their family to a slowly increasing background supply of lead.
Someone on Lemmy wrote, a little over a year ago I think, that lead ossifies in the bones and then gets released into the blood as bones soften with age. This then affects the brain and might explain why older people have seemingly sudden personality changes. I think about this often.
There’s some studies that look into this and its effects on mental health of all stripes. I’m certain in the coming decades there’ll be more as the boomers start suffering and dying.
It is one of the processes of lead poisoning yes. Lead is mistaken for Calcium and stored in your bones.
I wouldn’t rule it out. They wanted a new Rome, and they’re getting one - complete with Diarrhea Forever™
The “Super gun owners” account for only like 3% of Americans. And a lot of those still don’t shoot enough to meaningfully manifest the symptoms of lead poisoning on its own.
It’s probably just medical advances letting bitter racist old fucks live longer.
Old fucks who grew up with so much lead in the atmosphere from burning gasoline that the lead from a few recreational bullets is just noise.
And the paint, don’t forget the leaded paint. And the ceramic tile. And cosmetics. And costume jewelry. And pipes/plumbing. And pottery. And older vinyl, like blinds. And almost all older strained glass uses lead to hold the panels together. And even older plastics often contained lead to soften the material, and we all know how badly old plastic often deteriorates.
There’s a shit ton of lead in products made before the turn of the century.
9 million people is still a lot of people, much less the kids playing with the ‘bb pellets’ in their closet and other exposures due to those 9 mil.
And all that lead in gasoline they had kicking around everywhere growing up.
Derek Muller has a lot of interesting, sad, and scary things to say about that: https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA
Well there’s on going studies that lead poisoning/exposure leads to mental degredation in various ways, including parkinson’s/alheimer’s and similar neurological diseases.
Lead exposure won’t make good people bad, but it will make bad people worse.
Leaded gas was prominent in the US until it was phased out ~1980-90s. I’ve always wonder if this had a large effect on those growing up in earlier times, i.e. those in their 60-70s now, or the baby boomer generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
Nah, I’m far enough left that I believe in getting guns back.
Were your parents using guns on the regular?That is the important question here, because lead has very long lasting consequences.
(Btw, just having guns does fuck all against militarized police units)
It’s from them licking paint.
The US has a lot of gun owners, but it also has a lot of people who don’t own guns but are MAGAs anyway.
They might have grown up in a household with an active gun owner, which, when combined with bad hygiene practices after shooting, might cause lead to cause developmental effects.