Although the final results are not yet in, it is almost certain that 2024 will be the hottest year on record. Almost every week this year, we’ve heard news about new daily or monthly records being broken, or extreme weather events becoming more extreme due to human-induced climate change. Unusual rains caused flooding in July that triggered deadly landslides in India’s Kerala region, killing hundreds of people. In September, Hurricane Helen was one of the largest storms to hit the United States, bringing torrential rain and massive storm surge to the Southeast due to record-breaking ocean temperatures. At the time of writing, the death toll from the hurricane had exceeded 230.
Sadly, coverage of these events often evokes a sense of déjà vu, if not ennui, rather than shock, sadness, or anger. If 2024 turns out to be the hottest year on record, it will be the fifth time in less than a decade that we have faced such a stark truth. Perhaps for this reason, the fossil fuel industry’s response has been to shrug its shoulders and argue that, despite all the climate change fossil fuels cause, we cannot live without them. Kinder Morgan, which owns and operates the pipeline, said in a white paper released earlier this year: “The economic and social need for fossil fuels is enduring, and they will continue to play a central role in our lives.” ExxonMobil’s 2024 World Outlook declares that oil and natural gas will “remain essential” because they are “necessary to modern life.”
It is essential for civilization to drastically reduce the use of coal, oil and gas.
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Anyone involved in the energy and environment debate knows that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy takes time. In fact, this is why it is so important that the oil and gas industry has worked for decades to delay the transition, and now even recognizes it as necessary.
The argument that we can’t live without dangerous or even deadly products is an old one. In their new book about the history of health disparities in the United States (and the role of corporate America in creating and reinforcing many of those disparities), historians David Rozner and Gerald Markowitz write about fossil fuels 99 years ago. It details the discussions that took place when the fuel industry declined. He defended the practice of adding lead to gasoline, a practice that would soon kill many people.
By the 1920s, many people, especially American physician and Harvard professor Alice Hamilton, became concerned about occupational exposure to toxic substances such as lead, asbestos, and mercury. Hamilton is an expert on lead poisoning, and some states have passed laws limiting exposure to toxic substances in the workplace based on her work. When the oil industry decided to add lead to gasoline, Hamilton became concerned. This situation put her at odds with some of the biggest names in American business, including industrialists Charles F. Kettering and Alfred P. Sloan, and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller.
General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline would solve the problem of knocking, the noise caused by uneven or incomplete combustion of fuel in an engine. I discovered it. Mr. Midgley worked under Kettering, GM’s head of research, who reported directly to Sloan, GM’s CEO. GM soon contracted with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to add tetraethyl lead to gasoline. By 1923 the product was on the market.
But there was a catch. It has been known since classical antiquity that lead is highly toxic. Midgley himself suffered a bout of lead poisoning as a result of his research. Many workers in industrial settings where lead was used became ill or died. So GM and DuPont, manufacturers of tetraethyl lead, agreed to sell the product simply as “ethyl.”
It didn’t take long for scientists to voice their concerns. Rozner and Markowitz said the U.S. military secretary sent a letter to DuPont’s chairman asking whether the company had considered the public health implications. Mr. Migley acknowledged that neither DuPont nor GM collects relevant data, but maintained that the amount to which the average person is exposed is still harmless.
In 1925, the Surgeon General organized a conference of businessmen, union leaders, scientists, doctors, and government officials to consider the issue. Given what Mr. Midgley told the Surgeon General, one might expect that representatives of American industry would insist that lead in gasoline is safe. Rather, they argued that it was essential to the American economy, industrial progress, and the American way of life.
Kettering argued that because oil supplies are limited, anything that improves efficiency must be considered essential. “The continued development of motor fuels is essential to our civilization,” Standard Oil lawyers and engineers said at the conference.
In later years, industry representatives and advocates would return to this theme. True, some workers got sick or died, but this was the price of progress. magazine editor chemical and metallurgical engineering He argued that the “casualties” caused by lead were “insignificant compared to the human cost in the development of many other industrial enterprises.”
In 1965, geochemist Clare C. Patterson of the California Institute of Technology discovered that many Americans had blood lead levels more than 100 times higher than those from natural sources and were known to cause at least low levels of lead poisoning. It is estimated that the concentration is much higher than the actual concentration. Meanwhile, other scientific studies are proving that even low levels of lead exposure can cause neurotoxicity and have alarming effects on intelligence and behavior. In 1973, the United States began phasing out leaded gasoline. In 2021, Algeria became the last country to ban it.
Removing lead from the gas had a dramatic positive effect. One study found that between 1976 and 1995, Americans’ average blood lead levels fell by 90 percent. Furthermore, the dire prophecies of Miggly and his friends did not come true. Not only did the American economy not collapse when leaded gasoline was phased out for cars, it took only a few years for automakers to redesign their engines to run on unleaded gasoline. . Leaded gasoline was not essential to civilization, and it is not a fossil fuel. It is imperative for civilization to significantly reduce the use of coal, oil, and gas, which are the greatest source of existential threat from global climate change, thereby putting the planet on track for a more secure future. is.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.
