One of the fastest-gentrifying parts of Austin is near the site of the former Holly Street power plant, and all the neighborhood soil is almost certainly deeply contaminated with lead as a result. I’ve had to beg friends who moved into the area to avoid planting backyard food gardens. Really, just having easier/more available soil testing would make a massive difference, because it can be a hassle to actually get soil tested for lead right now.
Just here to plug the Brooklyn Soils Lab (part of CUNY Brooklyn College), which will test your soil sample for lead for $20. Worth doing if you have kids or like to garden! This is part of a public university research program, not a for-profit venture.
If we could vote for such things... I'd enthusiastically vote to just not do the whole Murray / IQ debate here. They always turn out gross. I'd also vote to not do eugenic-adjacent debates here. If we could vote on such things...
I read this piece as a good reminder of why we should give no quater to the “Human biodiversity” community - they dont want to remove the lead because they prefer the explanation that the racialised poor are genetically inferior.
It really felt like Matt was pulling his punches on Scott Siskind, if Steve Sailer was a commenter in good standing at Slowboring what would that tell you about your work?
(I loved your Vox piece on Charles Murray, why ya gotta be so generous to these IDW useful idiots for conservatism?)
This brings me to a hobby-horse of mine: Shooting guns w/ in indoor ranges causes lead exposure! And cops do it frequently. And cops are just about the worst people I can imagine to give lead exposure to.
Read Kevin Drum's article... so if violent crime peaked in the 90s when the peak lead-poisened children were reaching prime crime age in their early 20s, are we now seeing the cresting wave of authoritarian populism, as that same cohort starts to reach retirement and peak Tucker Carlson rage-watching age? Lead poisoning + free time - distraction = aggressive anti-social behavior? One can dream...
Matt does not mention ongoing atmospheric sources for lead, other than perhaps inferring lead sequestered in soils and house paint may be released as dust when disturbed. General aviation (GA) aircraft are the largest ongoing source of atmospheric lead. While lead as an anti-knock compound was finally eliminated from auto fuel in the US in the 1990’s, most folks don’t realize that aviation gasoline (avgas) continues to contain tetraethyl lead (TEL). Avgas is used in the GA piston-engine driven fleet, consisting of about 200,000 registered aircraft in the US. In 2019, GA aircraft consumed 200 million gallons of leaded gasoline. To put that into perspective, this annual total is but half what the US automobile fleet consumed in a single day in 2019. Still, given the concentration of TEL in avgas is ~2 grams per gallon, I calculate that over 900,000 lbs of TEL was injected into the atmosphere in 2019 by GA aircraft. There’s no reason to believe this will decrease in the near term, as efforts to replace leaded avgas have been underway for decades, but have yet to yield a viable product.
It’s worth noting that about half the GA fleet is powered by lower-compression engines that don’t require the TEL anti-knock properties. Regulatory approval is available for these aircraft to use unleaded, ethanol-free automobile gas (mogas) of at least 91 octane. However, as leaded avgas (100LL) is the only gasoline routinely available at most airports and many pilots are resistant to change, only a small percentage of the eligible aircraft actually use ethanol-free mogas. (See Options for Reducing Lead Emissions from Piston-Engine Aircraft (https://www.nap.edu/download/26050)
Diving into the numbers of, say, the New Zealand study cited makes me (very gently!) question the actual significance of the effect. There, the mean lead level was 10.99+/-4.63 µg/dL (overall range 4-31, so already pretty high!). They conclude, among other things, that "each 5-µg/dL higher level of blood lead in childhood was associated with a 1.61-point lower score in adult IQ". I doubt anyone claims that an IQ test is accurate to within 1-2 points, so this is something that can only be teased out in large samples under the assumption that errors are evenly distributed. Finally, they didn't use raw IQ numbers but rather ones "adjust[ed] for maternal IQ, childhood IQ, and childhood socioeconomic status". How reliable are these adjustments?
I hope no one thinks I'm trying to claim ingesting lead is fine! I've just become skeptical of studies such as this that try to claim a huge effect requiring many billions of dollars based on aggregation of tiny effects, where each was already adjusted through an opaque formula. Then again, maybe a lot of what we choose to spend money ultimately comes down to the same imprecise analysis anyway?
I get nervous when I read an article about environmental exposure where there is no consideration of relative risk and potential risk reduction (and relative cost of risk reduction). Maybe I missed it in my quick read. Lead exposure is clearly important, however exposure to other heavy metals, organic pollutants, pathogens, particulates in general, ... have significant health effects. How does the effect of exposure to lead compare to exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals, to cadmium or arsenic. Where is our effort and money best spent. I expect lead is important, but be careful signaling out one exposure without acknowledging others and considering relative risk.
So I am going to stand up for highways as a form of transportation. Women get sexually assaulted on public transportation more than in their own cars. Wen the public discusses public transportation vs driving and parking we don't talk about this. personal safety from crime is always worse on public transit than in cars. Yes I have read the stories that adding more highways doesn't help traffic because it just encourages more economic activity by allowing people do things when they want to do then rather than after 7 pm. Highways increase economic activity. And with electric cars it is entirely possible that they will as green as public transportation.
Guns. Gun powder. Bullets. Shot. Gun ranges. Popular hunting lands. Lead. Lead. Lead. Sorry to be the wet blanket but getting lead out of soil is a bigger fight than I think you realize. Old gun ranges have lead in the soils not measured in micrograms but in dumptrucks. There have been huge fights in CA over this where remediation laws are already strict. Just saying, NRA will get involved.
This is kind of goofy, but as the college drop out in a family of people with masters degrees, I’m convinced I have a mild case of lead poisoning. I always had poor impulse control and an attention deficit as a kid, and as the youngest when we moved into our new house, also spent the longest chunk of my formative years drinking water from lead pipes. I’m fine with it, I just think it’s kind of funny.
Don't ignore the international angle to this: the US phased out leaded gasoline in the 70's, but other nations continued using it for decades. Dupont Mexico was still making TEL for leaded gasoline sales in the early 90's.
A US AID program did good work in the late 90's persuading other countries to phase it out, but Algeria was still using it in 2017.
All of this makes me wonder: would there be a better ROI on abatement efforts in countries where the lead is more recent, and closer to the surface?
Keep in mind that with any purification or extraction process, getting 90% of the X out of the Y is easy, getting the next 9% out is much harder, getting the next 0.9% out costs just as much as the first 90%, and getting the successive 0.09% and so on get more and more difficult and costly. Yes, the US would get some benefit from getting out the last micrograms, but if there are countries around with kilograms, that may be the place to start.
But would that effort count as infrastructure spending, here in the US of A? Depends on how global the circulation of lead is. When we were all burning it in gas, it was highly global: it showed up in ice-cores world wide. But if the current lead in (e.g.) Mexico is not being burned, but is in the soil, then is it still a threat to US neurons? I simply don't know.
Point remains: if the US is *relatively* clean, then the same dollars will clean up a *lot* more lead in a dirtier country.
And the Senator from Dupont, as well as his fellow citizens, may have a moral duty to help clean up messes that we helped to make.
This seems like a good moment for the tech rationalists and Effective Altruism. Elon could push money here instead of his car tubes, alongside Zuck and Bezos. They could start by investing in regions dear to them - if those exist -.
One of the fastest-gentrifying parts of Austin is near the site of the former Holly Street power plant, and all the neighborhood soil is almost certainly deeply contaminated with lead as a result. I’ve had to beg friends who moved into the area to avoid planting backyard food gardens. Really, just having easier/more available soil testing would make a massive difference, because it can be a hassle to actually get soil tested for lead right now.
Just here to plug the Brooklyn Soils Lab (part of CUNY Brooklyn College), which will test your soil sample for lead for $20. Worth doing if you have kids or like to garden! This is part of a public university research program, not a for-profit venture.
https://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/centers/esac/services/soil.php
If we could vote for such things... I'd enthusiastically vote to just not do the whole Murray / IQ debate here. They always turn out gross. I'd also vote to not do eugenic-adjacent debates here. If we could vote on such things...
I read this piece as a good reminder of why we should give no quater to the “Human biodiversity” community - they dont want to remove the lead because they prefer the explanation that the racialised poor are genetically inferior.
It really felt like Matt was pulling his punches on Scott Siskind, if Steve Sailer was a commenter in good standing at Slowboring what would that tell you about your work?
(I loved your Vox piece on Charles Murray, why ya gotta be so generous to these IDW useful idiots for conservatism?)
This brings me to a hobby-horse of mine: Shooting guns w/ in indoor ranges causes lead exposure! And cops do it frequently. And cops are just about the worst people I can imagine to give lead exposure to.
I don't know why I don't see this covered, ever.
Read Kevin Drum's article... so if violent crime peaked in the 90s when the peak lead-poisened children were reaching prime crime age in their early 20s, are we now seeing the cresting wave of authoritarian populism, as that same cohort starts to reach retirement and peak Tucker Carlson rage-watching age? Lead poisoning + free time - distraction = aggressive anti-social behavior? One can dream...
Matt does not mention ongoing atmospheric sources for lead, other than perhaps inferring lead sequestered in soils and house paint may be released as dust when disturbed. General aviation (GA) aircraft are the largest ongoing source of atmospheric lead. While lead as an anti-knock compound was finally eliminated from auto fuel in the US in the 1990’s, most folks don’t realize that aviation gasoline (avgas) continues to contain tetraethyl lead (TEL). Avgas is used in the GA piston-engine driven fleet, consisting of about 200,000 registered aircraft in the US. In 2019, GA aircraft consumed 200 million gallons of leaded gasoline. To put that into perspective, this annual total is but half what the US automobile fleet consumed in a single day in 2019. Still, given the concentration of TEL in avgas is ~2 grams per gallon, I calculate that over 900,000 lbs of TEL was injected into the atmosphere in 2019 by GA aircraft. There’s no reason to believe this will decrease in the near term, as efforts to replace leaded avgas have been underway for decades, but have yet to yield a viable product.
It’s worth noting that about half the GA fleet is powered by lower-compression engines that don’t require the TEL anti-knock properties. Regulatory approval is available for these aircraft to use unleaded, ethanol-free automobile gas (mogas) of at least 91 octane. However, as leaded avgas (100LL) is the only gasoline routinely available at most airports and many pilots are resistant to change, only a small percentage of the eligible aircraft actually use ethanol-free mogas. (See Options for Reducing Lead Emissions from Piston-Engine Aircraft (https://www.nap.edu/download/26050)
Diving into the numbers of, say, the New Zealand study cited makes me (very gently!) question the actual significance of the effect. There, the mean lead level was 10.99+/-4.63 µg/dL (overall range 4-31, so already pretty high!). They conclude, among other things, that "each 5-µg/dL higher level of blood lead in childhood was associated with a 1.61-point lower score in adult IQ". I doubt anyone claims that an IQ test is accurate to within 1-2 points, so this is something that can only be teased out in large samples under the assumption that errors are evenly distributed. Finally, they didn't use raw IQ numbers but rather ones "adjust[ed] for maternal IQ, childhood IQ, and childhood socioeconomic status". How reliable are these adjustments?
I hope no one thinks I'm trying to claim ingesting lead is fine! I've just become skeptical of studies such as this that try to claim a huge effect requiring many billions of dollars based on aggregation of tiny effects, where each was already adjusted through an opaque formula. Then again, maybe a lot of what we choose to spend money ultimately comes down to the same imprecise analysis anyway?
I get nervous when I read an article about environmental exposure where there is no consideration of relative risk and potential risk reduction (and relative cost of risk reduction). Maybe I missed it in my quick read. Lead exposure is clearly important, however exposure to other heavy metals, organic pollutants, pathogens, particulates in general, ... have significant health effects. How does the effect of exposure to lead compare to exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals, to cadmium or arsenic. Where is our effort and money best spent. I expect lead is important, but be careful signaling out one exposure without acknowledging others and considering relative risk.
Didn’t Hillary have an ambitious lead plan? Any chance of that being revived?
So I am going to stand up for highways as a form of transportation. Women get sexually assaulted on public transportation more than in their own cars. Wen the public discusses public transportation vs driving and parking we don't talk about this. personal safety from crime is always worse on public transit than in cars. Yes I have read the stories that adding more highways doesn't help traffic because it just encourages more economic activity by allowing people do things when they want to do then rather than after 7 pm. Highways increase economic activity. And with electric cars it is entirely possible that they will as green as public transportation.
Guns. Gun powder. Bullets. Shot. Gun ranges. Popular hunting lands. Lead. Lead. Lead. Sorry to be the wet blanket but getting lead out of soil is a bigger fight than I think you realize. Old gun ranges have lead in the soils not measured in micrograms but in dumptrucks. There have been huge fights in CA over this where remediation laws are already strict. Just saying, NRA will get involved.
Another post I would love to share! Maybe subscribers can get 3 "free share rights" or something per month?
This is kind of goofy, but as the college drop out in a family of people with masters degrees, I’m convinced I have a mild case of lead poisoning. I always had poor impulse control and an attention deficit as a kid, and as the youngest when we moved into our new house, also spent the longest chunk of my formative years drinking water from lead pipes. I’m fine with it, I just think it’s kind of funny.
Don't ignore the international angle to this: the US phased out leaded gasoline in the 70's, but other nations continued using it for decades. Dupont Mexico was still making TEL for leaded gasoline sales in the early 90's.
A US AID program did good work in the late 90's persuading other countries to phase it out, but Algeria was still using it in 2017.
All of this makes me wonder: would there be a better ROI on abatement efforts in countries where the lead is more recent, and closer to the surface?
Keep in mind that with any purification or extraction process, getting 90% of the X out of the Y is easy, getting the next 9% out is much harder, getting the next 0.9% out costs just as much as the first 90%, and getting the successive 0.09% and so on get more and more difficult and costly. Yes, the US would get some benefit from getting out the last micrograms, but if there are countries around with kilograms, that may be the place to start.
But would that effort count as infrastructure spending, here in the US of A? Depends on how global the circulation of lead is. When we were all burning it in gas, it was highly global: it showed up in ice-cores world wide. But if the current lead in (e.g.) Mexico is not being burned, but is in the soil, then is it still a threat to US neurons? I simply don't know.
Point remains: if the US is *relatively* clean, then the same dollars will clean up a *lot* more lead in a dirtier country.
And the Senator from Dupont, as well as his fellow citizens, may have a moral duty to help clean up messes that we helped to make.
This seems like a good moment for the tech rationalists and Effective Altruism. Elon could push money here instead of his car tubes, alongside Zuck and Bezos. They could start by investing in regions dear to them - if those exist -.