
An Updated Lead-Crime Roundup (2018) - luu
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
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bluejekyll
Remember the person who discovered how bad the lead pollution was in the world
from leaded gasoline while dating the age of the planet, Clair Cameron
Patterson:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson)

He spent nearly twenty years fighting for lead to be removed from gasoline.

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whenchamenia
Too bad its still used by the millions of barrels in Aviation. Why do we still
allow tetra-ethyl lead outside antique aircraft?

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throw0101a
Mostly limited to pistol-powered aircraft that use 100LL, and not anything
with a turbine / jet engine (which uses diesel-like Jet-A fuel (kerosene
family)).

The FAA is working on it, but it seems it's not a simple problem:

* [https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2018/october/03...](https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2018/october/03/faa-sees-mid-2020-completion-of-unleaded-avgas-project)

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throw0101a
An observation: the baby boomers is one of the largest demographic cohorts out
there, and they were exposed to lead a lot. So I'm wondering if the way
politics was run from the 1980s onward has anything to do with impaired
"executive functions that allow people to understand the consequences of their
actions".

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spamizbad
Probably, although Boomers are getting up in years and many of the most
heavily impacted by lead most likely are not involved in politics either due
to death, apathy, or incarceration.

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gniv
I didn’t know that countries in the Middle East stopped using leaded gasoline
much later (90s). This short post linked from the article has interesting
speculation: [https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/prediction-
te...](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/prediction-terrorism-
middle-east-will-decline-half-between-2020-and-2040/)

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jmkd
A staggering yet rather unfashionable set of studies supporting the compelling
hypothesis that lead exposure in childhood contributes to an increase in
violent crime later.

One gets the sense that laying blame for specific modern social issues on such
external, physical (historical) forces is an uphill struggle; by not providing
enough actionable insight for today, the results are too abstract and
seemingly inapplicable for us to learn much from them.

Yet the evidence is overwhelming. More, it highlights the difficulty faced in
acknowledging and reducing the impact of as-yet-unrecognisably dangerous
substances and technologies today.

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habnds
>It’s important to emphasize that the lead-crime hypothesis doesn’t claim that
lead is solely responsible for crime. It primarily explains only one thing:
the huge rise in crime of the 70s and 80s and the equally huge—and completely
unexpected—decline in crime of the 90s and aughts.

