> The most compelling option was actually ethanol.
But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production. And oil companies like Du Pont "hated it," he wrote, perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine.
I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening.
What are the solutions to this? What governing system would have mass produced ethenol as the best antiknocker with no regard to the interests of top players?
Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business?
TEL (tetraethyl lead) had and has other advantages over ethanol beyond patentability -
Unlike TEL, ethanol is hydrophilic, which makes gasoline blended with it more apt to be contaminated with water, and other water containing contaminants, this is particularly relevant for aviation uses and also reducing incidences of vapor lock.
TEL is also (more) rubber and seal friendly, other than the (very) high risk of lead toxicity, TEL blended gasoline is easier to work with and process than Ethanol blended gasoline.
TEL also acts as a natural lubricant of its own, the lead acting as lubricant, particularly on valve and other top end engine components.
This isn't really a defense of TEL - particularly not in road gas, while it was understood that exposure to large quantities of lead was toxic, toxicity of low dose exposure to environmental lead wasn't really fully understood until the 50's/60's, we also didn't really understood how long environmental lead lingered around until the 60's. Modern technologies have overcome much of the issues from ethanol in road gas, but there are reasons TEL is still used in AvGas.
TEL in AvGas was vital in reaching higher octane, and Ethanol is contraindicated in AvGas (at the last I looked into the topic) because of its hydrophilic nature - our ability (the allies) to produce high octane AvGas is one of the factors that won WW2, and use of TEL was a deciding factor in that.
Those problems were solved for cars, they can be solved for planes. We shouldn't use it. Bioaccumulation of heavy metals was understood very early. Everything has a cost, spraying lead everywhere should be higher than what we are willing to pay.
I am guessing it's still allowed because people who fly planes can afford to lobby.
I was astounded to find TEL was still allowed in aviation fuels. Rates of cancers etc are higher near military bases due to fuel handling incidents.
> Rates of cancers etc are higher near military bases due to fuel handling incidents.
Avgas is only used in piston engines, and the military mostly flies turbines, which use ordinary jet fuel (which does not contain lead). They have some, but I think if you told the military "jets and turboprops only" it wouldn't be a big problem. (Not sure how they would train new pilots, however.)
If you're looking for disease/damage from lead in avgas, you want to find a little airport in the middle of nowhere that has a really good restaurant on the field ;)
> I am guessing it's still allowed because people who fly planes can afford to lobby.
People that fly piston engines do not have any money to lobby.
To me it feels very similar to why software engineers pay so much tax -- we get paid just enough to be dinged by things like the AMT, but not enough to afford lobbyists.
Politically the rationale is likely that this constituency is small and so forcing them will have a relatively small benefit compared to the main policy goal; but they really care. If you fly a piston prop, you likely don't have $1M spare (you could use that to trade your piston plane for a small jet) for Washington lobbyists, but you do have a vote and you care about banning the only fuel you are authorised to use enough that you're going to use that vote and you're going to be loud about it.
A previous article about Leaded Petrol caused me to read how the UK exempted some very old cars which could not be effectively modified. There's actually a waiver so that, in theory, every fuel station in the country can do paperwork to get a small amount of leaded gasoline (a tiny fraction of their total fuel sales) and sell it for this purpose. The politicians were thus able to tell their constituents we did not screw you, just ask your local supplier to set aside fuel for you.
But economics does the rest, at first those retailers see sales of leaded fuel are very low. Those who love classics maybe decide to set aside the option for a year or two and see how it goes, everybody else stops selling leaded fuel. The wholesalers now see that sales of leaded fuel are tiny, so they don't bother making it, it becomes a special order, which then further increases the pressure not to bother stocking it. Today enthusiasts will just mail order the lead additive and pour it into their tank after a refill or they use a substitute additive which these days works well enough, the politicians didn't have to lift a finger.
It will be over, but it’s not over yet. Your link says that it will both take a while for it to come to market and also be more expensive to produce…an expense that will likely be balked at by the airlines until forced to use it at which point it will be the customers that pay.
Airlines (outside of bush planes) are not using AvGas in any substantive quantity, and have not been since the early 60's. The amount of AvGas used a year is dwarfed (several times over) by the amount of Jet Fuel (Jet A does not have TEL in it).
AvGas (which uses TEL) is used by general aviation exclusively.
I would guess one thing that confuses non-pilots is that while say an A320 or a 747 looks like it has jet engines, lots of small regional aircraft (e.g. a Dash-8) visibly have propellers, and so it's natural for lay people to assume that's basically the same idea as on a Cessna 172 or a Spitfire scaled up.
But it isn't. Those planes aren't aren't fuelled by AvGas. Their engines use JetA (basically kerosene) because they've got a turbine inside like those turbofan engines which look so visibly different, however their turbine powers the propeller rather than a set of fans to drive more air through the engine and produce thrust that way.
For people not familiar with terminology, “general aviation” does not mean “regular airplanes”, but, to a first approximation, “small piston-engined airplanes”, operated by hobbyists or small charter operations.
I don't think most "small charter operations" would be General Aviation (unless I understand what's being chartered here?) and although most GA planes are pistons that's not part of the definition. What matters is why you're flying, not what you fly.
The categories (for non-military use) are generally Scheduled or Air Transport (any time you buy tickets for a flight, that's the category, you don't know or care who is flying, you paid for the journey between a specific origin and destination at a specific time; a FedEx plane is also Transport), then Commercial (not Transport but somebody is getting paid to fly aircraft, maybe it's crop spraying, TV news copter, police, or just another TV priest being flown around in his private jet), and only if nobody was getting paid is it General Aviation.
If your cosmetic dentist can afford a brand new Vision Jet so that he can live 100 miles away and fly in to do $5000 appointments without sitting in traffic, that's General Aviation. The authorities don't care that he's getting paid to be a dentist, he's not getting paid to fly his plane.
If your airline uses a relatively tiny PA-42 to get customers to an obscure but important airstrip with maybe 3-4 passengers per day that's still Air Transport.
On the other hand if some oil sheik owns their own A320 with their own custom decor and has a team of pilots to fly it wherever they want, that's still only Commercial, not Air Transport because nobody is buying tickets, it just goes wherever he wants.
GA is non-commercial, non-military, non-aerial-work (application, survey, etc). The pilots can be paid employees and have it still be GA. (Your sheik A320 example would be considered GA, not commercial, as would business operators, fractional operators, and of course private operations.)
Don’t confuse the commercial certificate[“license”](which is required to be paid for flying) with commercial operations (typically holding out to the public for air transport).
>AvGas (which uses TEL) is used by general aviation exclusively.
And by people who don't want to ever have to clean or rebuild a carburetor in their small motors. It's been an exceptional motor-life-extender to my chainsaws specifically.
For what it's worth, unleaded avgas is already available at some of the Bay Area airports as of recent, and it's currently priced cheaper than traditional leaded avgas.
It’s UL94, so lower octane (94 octane, as the name suggests). However, this is still fine for lower performance aircraft that make up the majority of the GA fleet.
There’s been a lot of interest in it, especially in light of the recent discussions to close RHV in San Jose. I know one of the flight schools here just switched all their aircraft over to UL94.
Higher performance aircraft will need UL100, which is still not available, but is expected soon. There’s been significant progress in getting it approved over the last year.
Swift Fuels sells the supplemental type certificate aircraft owners need to use UL94. They are offering a free upgrade to the UL100 STC once it’s offered, so aircraft owners don’t have to pay twice to start using UL94 today.
> It’s UL94, so lower octane (94 octane, as the name suggests). However, this is still fine for lower performance aircraft that make up the majority of the GA fleet.
The standard story seems to be that 20% of the planes burn 80% of the fuel, and need all the octane in 100LL. And GA is such a small market that airfields can't justify having multiple fuel grades available, so 100LL everywhere it is.
But yes, nice to hear that UL94 is nonetheless available in some places.
The amount of TEL used in AvGas is infinitesimally small, its only used in Aviation Gasoline, which is only used in older piston engined craft, the military flies none of these as far as I know.
We fill our cars every week and when you stand there thinking "damn I love this smell" yet when there's 1ppm of benzene in sun cream people scream "caaaancer"...
There are few technical reasons, to be sure, but there are plenty of economic and business reasons. The most popular engines in general aviation are Continental/Lycoming ones, and these are based on what, 50+ years old basic designs? Automotive industry have developed significantly better piston engines in last few decades, in terms of power to weight ratio, fuel efficiency, MTBF and service interval. However, the nature of the field, its relative niche quality, and regulatory framework make it difficult to adapt and adopt them in general aviation. There has been recent attempt to do it, with diesel engines from German automotive industry, but they are facing a lot of very real problems, for example, lack of maintenance infrastructure.
> but they are facing a lot of very real problems, for example, lack of maintenance infrastructure.
Comprehensive government regulation would create such an infrastructure. When the government says "in 5 years we will disallow creation of new airframes that use leaded gas, and in 10 years there will be no more leaded gas sold, and in 15 years additives will be illegal", everyone knows what's on the horizon - and you can bet that there will be engine vendors selling modification kits and maintenance infrastructure, since now everyone knows that there will be a massive market coming up as everyone has to adapt to the new rules if they want to keep flying!
> Comprehensive government regulation would create such an infrastructure.
Or, it would destroy small engine general aviation.
> and you can bet that there will be engine vendors selling modification kits and maintenance infrastructure, since now everyone knows that there will be a massive market coming up as everyone has to adapt to the new rules if they want to keep flying!
What if, you know, people can't adapt? What if people can't afford to replace their 40 years old aircrafts with sparkling new ones, costing 5-10 times much? Sure, some of them will, but there are many hobbyists who can afford loan payments and insurance on a plane worth $100k, but couldn't do the same on one worth $500k.
Yes, this would stop emissions of TEL, sure, but at tremendous cost. Is that cost worth it? To our (and FAA, and EPA) best knowledge, probably not, as lead emissions from GA have much different characteristic than the ones from cars.
"The temperature for Lead deposits to form tend to be favourable around the spark plugs (as the whole mixture is quite cool before the flame starts to propagate) and on the exhaust valve stem (as the mixture cools after combustion). The problem is that the deposits are electrically conductive, which shorts out the spark plug - and corrosive, which can start to attack the metal of the valve stems."
It's the supposed benefits of the post-combustion lead oxide deposits that defenders of leaded gas cite. I have never heard anyone cite the lubricity of TEL itself.
The most popular theory is that the lead oxide fouling reduces the occurence or effects of micro-welds between valve and seat surfaces, which otherwise produce abrasive particles that contribute to valve seat recession. While this theory is plausible, it has not been shown to occur under normal operating conditions in automotive engines, nor in aviation engines as far as I know.
The final report from the EPA's Valve Seat Recession Working Group found no evidence that leaded gas reduces engine wear under any but the most extreme operating conditions:
"In real world conditions, virtually no evidence of excessive valve wear has been found in vehicle or engine operation in normal everyday use, and several studies that monitored vehicles in actual daily service in countries that eliminated lead found no excessive valve wear."
"Dry gas" which is used to correct moisture problems in cars' fuel systems is alcohol: Ethanol, methanol, etc. and it takes advantage of alcohol being hydrophilic.
Ethanol has requirements for hoses and seals that might otherwise be degraded by alcohol. But this is not an ongoing issue in modern vehicles.
The same property, increased ability to absorb water, both helps to remove excess of water and can cause a problem in the longer-term.
It's like using a towel to dry your shower tray: in the short run it's helpful but if you leave it there all the time you'll end up with a permanently soggy towel keeping everything damp.
>Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business?
Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to keep 100% of their pensions available at all times.
Various crown corp electric companies were profitable in Canada and SaskTel, a crown corp telecommunications company is the last bastion of non-insane cell phone plans though I'm sure Rogers and Bell are working on it.
People just hate seeing the government make money. They see that things are good, say "hey, why should the government get this money" and then shut down the system that's working and complain when everything costs more because private industry is trying to squeeze every last cent out of them.
I think this is an overly simplistic (and I've seen this argument on the internet a lot) argument. It's true that there are a lot of people, especially in Anglo countries, who oppose any policy that could allow the State to be enriched. But it's also true that there are many crappy state-owned enterprises. My family came from a developing country that used to have _most_ things run by the state, and there was widespread corruption in the government which kept service bad and prices high.
I do think it would be useful for economists to analyze the conditions under which state-run entities create good outcomes, but in the currently charged political climate, it probably won't happen.
Provision of services is usually corrupt and high cost in less developed countries regardless of who’s providing it: public or private sector. That is my personal experience.
> People just hate seeing the government make money.
No, this is too generic - name the correct groups: Conservatives, neo-liberals and the rich elites hate see "the government" or government-owned/ran entities make money.
Everyone else sees that government-run services usually provide decent service at affordable prices, and that after privatization, service quality goes downhill and the cost keeps rising.
That's incredibly wrong. Nearly every conservative I know feels that government services should be ran like a business, as also profitable like a business (at least self-sustainable). What they disagree with is funding those services with tax money. Which obviously follows.
> What they disagree with is funding those services with tax money.
Without massive governmental subsidies, many services - especially public transport, postal service, libraries - would simply be unaffordable for wide parts of the population.
Intellectual property reform could be a solution. It sounds like they might have gone with ethanol if they weren't motivated by patents so that they could prevent free market competition. We see the same thing with pharmaceuticals and in many other industries. I'm not particularly convinced that intellectual property laws are anywhere close to a net positive for consumers or society at large.
Patents, but also copyright on software. We gain nothing by rewriting the software every time, OSS should be the default. Same for music. It’s more controversial but Spotify is monetizing convenience, not music, which itself is available for free on P2P.
I hear this frequently, but I don’t think it will do what many people think it would.
Part of the power of FOSS is that it often leans on copyright to compel sharing. But, in the absence of copyright, why wouldn’t capitalistic powers simply stop sharing their code?
I think the gp post was not suggesting “get rid of copyright and leave oss unprotected” - by “OSS should be the default” i read that it should continue to be protected while copyright is removed. It would not be hard for new laws to enshrine + protect OSS licenses
They're only opposite goals in as much as you see copyright and open source licenses as synonymous. I'm not a lawyer, but there are other forms of IP protections that are not copyright (patents, trademarks, etc). Seems like a new form of IP protection could be created to protect open source - i.e. "if someone says you can only modify this code if you re-share it, it is illegal to modify the code without re-sharing".
I understand what you are saying, but that simply is copyright under a different name. You are suggesting that someone should have the rights to control how others may copy their work: copyright.
I’m not sure that removing IP from the equation would have wholly changed the situation. There are other ways to control markets and they likely would have leaned on them instead.
The obvious example in my mind is a control of the means of production. For instance, if they used [x] instead and also happened to own all the [x] mines.
Or using anticompetitive practices to prevent competitors from joining the market.
To me this is an example of 3 negative features of free markets, exacerbated by a kyriarchic system, but I think it's fixable with work.
The three issues I see: One, the short-term market incentive was for them to have something patentable and controllable. Two, the money accrued to them but the harms fell to others, creating a huge negative externality. And three, free markets in goods tend to create markets in political power.
This is all exacerbated in a kyriarchic [1] system, one where domination hierarchies are normalized. Negative environmental externalities tend to fall on disfavored groups. The workers getting poisoned with lead were lower class; especially in that era, their deaths were seen as acceptable. Toxic spills don't happen on the Harvard campus or in wealthy suburbs, because however "safe" that stuff is in the official view, it's not so safe that elites will live next to it. Etc, etc.
We could eliminate a lot of this with just by preventing any money flow from business to politics. No donations, no gifts, no ads, no PACs. Perhaps no lobbyists. Politicians live on fixed budgets, any private wealth is put in index funds, and they are restricted after public service in what they can earn. The finances of politicians and former politicians are entirely public. The finances of executives and companies are also entirely public. We have well-funded, independent ethics watchdogs.
Then on top of that we have well-funded public science systems with empowered public health authorities. That definitely exists in the US at least in patches, so I think we could make rapid progress here.
And then I'd want to see strong laws where people making and profiting from harm are always held accountable. If we look at the 2008 financial crisis, nobody went to jail. A lot of people got rich doing dodgy things, and a few of them had to give a fraction of the money back. That did not teach a lot of lessons. One could argue that's ok in finance (although I wouldn't). But when it results in physical harm and death, I think the money and power should not be separable from the consequences. Currently CEOs and execs take paydays and walk away from things where I think negligent homicide charges are merited. Instead of "Gosh, I didn't know" being an acceptable excuse, I think the standard of "knew or should have known" and "could have acted differently" should be sufficient for execs.
> Politicians live on fixed budgets, any private wealth is put in index funds
I like where you are going with all this, but I'll nitpick here that while tying politicians' wealth to the overall stock market in general reduces their incentive to legislate in favor of particular companies, it does provide them incentive to legislate in favor of corporate America in general. We don't need laws that help stock market participants. ~50% of Americans don't hold stock in any form, even through mutual funds or retirement accounts.
I don't know what the solution is. As long as rule making can disproportionately affect the rule maker's own personal wealth and wellbeing, you have a conflict of interest.
> We don't need laws that help stock market participants. ~50% of Americans don't hold stock in any form
But everybody benefits from the wealth of society, which somewhat includes the value of the businesses within the economy.
Care needs to be taken not to kill the golden goose.
The problem I see with the US is the two party political system. I live in New Zealand and while MMP has serious problems, it was a great improvement over FPP.
Note I personally believe in equitable sharing of wealth ("The Scandinavian model"). But as a founder I also believe in the power of the incentives of personal gain from enterprise, which needs to be approximately 10:1 to break even given the risk (see VC).
Maybe we should address that problem -- it's one of the best long term ways for anyone to build wealth. Why aren't we educating people about this in school?
Of that 50%, many have negative wealth due to eg credit card debt, many have zero wealth because they're poor, and many have all of their wealth tied up in houses or cars. It's probably not ignorance so much as lack of savings to invest.
You could buy a cheaper car, or a cheaper house, or cheaper clothes, and put the difference into an IRA.
Yes some people must spend all their income on food and shelter. And government assistance stupidly penalizes people who try to save. But many people, even lower income people, could save a little. I think they have never been shown what the power of compounding can do over time. It is not intuitive, because the gains in early years are small.
It's not really a matter of education, I'm in the bottom 50% and after rent and bills I'm left with very little. It's a highly competitive system, with winners and losers.
Wouldn’t something like requiring their employers to pay into a pension fund that is invested in a safe mix of stocks and other assets allow more of the population to share in corporate profits? (Ignoring social security for the moment, but assuming the policy was implemented as a similar sort of thing; but perhaps not as a deduction from the nominal wage).
I don't think that's a good assumption. What you know is that, at the moment, some kinds of owning stock are effective at building wealth FOR NOW.
It could have inherent failure modes you're not taking into account. For instance, if systemic crashes are built into the model, and 'anyone' as a class is substantially more likely to risk such crashes and lose everything, that changes the calculation.
I'd like to see a system where, while in office, a representative's income is hard capped at the median income (or some multiplier of median) of the people they represent. This could apply to the president, too.
One could argue that such a policy actually just ends up incentivizing politicians to accept bribes. Then again, it isn't like the current salary of a congressman seems to be preventing that anyway.
Exactly. They should be able to live comfortably, so that they don't have to take bribes to survive. But wealth inequality in the US is so large that we can't pay them enough so they won't feel like they have to keep up with the joneses. If we made the salary, say, $10m/year we'd get the problem of totally unqualified loons pursuing the job and doing anything to keep it just because they wanted the money. So I think N times the median where N is between 1 and 10 is about the best we can do.
That's the rub, of course. I suspect there's a whole array of valid measures sufficient to blunt incentives. We don't need something perfect, just enough so legislators don't gain so much that their pecuniary motivations override their duty to public service (and their fear of getting caught). Right now they can profit massively from legislation by betting on individual companies. If they're instead looking at a blind trust that contains a mix of index funds, bond funds, etc, then they still are aligned with the wealthy, which is certainly bad, but any gains they can drive for themselves become much smaller.
> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening.
There are many such examples. Here’s one from my life: when I was in the pharmaceutical business one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease. He and a couple of others tried it on themselves. We could have patented it and run it through clinical trials, but it was something any compounding pharmacist could have whipped up so such a patent would have been worthless. We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program. Instead there are marketed, less effective products on the market.
Have you written about this anywhere? I'm curious what common disease could be cured in the manner you described. It seems like the low-hanging fruit is already picked clean in the pharma industry.
It was using urea to fight topical fungal infections (anti fungal drugs are typically quite toxic). The mechanism of action has been well known for decades; what the folks came us with was a formulation that got the dosage high enough without causing damage. It was easily whipped up in the lab but I don’t remember the details. Any notes from this would be long gone as this was over a decade ago and the company has been sold and surely any paper lab notebooks are buried and forgotten.
So the chemist and his friend had the exact same disease and it was successfully treated and they wouldn't release it because it could be made by someone else? Uh a recipe can be patented and that protects it from being sold. Compounding pharmacies can't magically ignore those patents if they don't want to get sued into oblivion or lose their license. I'm kind of skeptical of your story, sorry.
It’s not really practical to sue a thousand small businesses — you might not even hear about them. And anyway it’s better to go after a product with a protected high margin than try to fight where somebody else can attack your margin.
BTW it wasn’t “the chemist and his friend” — that would have been a crime. It was a few chemists in the company dosing themselves — also technically illegal but done all the time and generally excused if it’s a trivial scale and disclosed in your filings.
Feel free to be skeptical but those are the business issues.
>> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening.
>There are many such examples... one of the chemists developed a treatment for a fairly common disease... We were a startup so didn’t spend any effort doing a study much less a full program.
It's understandable that a startup could not invest further in something they can't sell. The problem seems therefor deeper than a general invocation of 'free markets'.
Perhaps the real problem is that apparently there was no way or perhaps incentive to publish the result without an expensive full study. Had the idea been published perhaps someone else would have picked it up. Would the recent fashion of preprints have helped?
Or maybe the problem is that pharmaceutical business/research income depends on patents alone, and we should have some form of public investment which guaranteed profits for development of treatments regardless of patents?
> Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money
Canada used to have crown corporations (until conservative governments sold them off to do a one time balancing of the budget).
When done well the crown Corp. serves a valuable purpose. The government no longer needs to rely on industry to tell them what is needed.
Eg. In this scenario the crown Corp. refinery would have their own scientists doing research to stop the engine knock and those scientists would have the expertise to know of safer alternatives and would use those as additives. Creating a more competitive environment.
The government can also use those industry experts to get honest answers on what the industry needs. Eg. “Mr. lobbyist, If these safety standards increase your industry’s costs too much then how come our own government plant is seeing net cost savings due to lower worker injuries?”
It’s a crime that in short term interests crown corps have largely stopped being a thing.
There are nearly 50 Canadian crown corporations, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC), and the Bank of Canada. There was even a new one created recently. The government created the Trans Mountain Corporation when they nationalized the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
> Perhaps the government should open companies [...] that are good for the people but bad for business?
Perhaps the government should close companies that are good for business but bad for the people instead.
In France after WW2, the companies that had participated in the German war effort, or to collaborate were simply confistated. When I see this kind of revelation, which show a complete breakage of corporate oversight and an evaporation of personal responsibility, I wonder whether the easiest solution may be to void existing stocks, have the government take over the board and re-auction the company once the management structure has been cleared.
>I wonder whether the easiest solution may be to void existing stocks, have the government take over the board and re-auction the company once the management structure has been cleared.
That's precisely what Norway did in its own financial crisis:
>In the last years of the 1980s, there was a major financial crisis in Norway and by 1991 the bank had used up all capital. To save the bank, the Government of Norway took over the bank and gave it new capital, rescuing it from bankruptcy.
It's a good idea: the shareholders, who boast that their returns come from the risk they're taking, should bear that risk. If the business is too big to fail, well, then it should just be brought under government control when it would otherwise fail.
Public opinion is the weak point in many systems that are supposed to converge to an optimal socially-beneficial equilibrium.
The way competition and free markets are supposed to work, someone else would've introduced ethanol as an anti-knock additive, sold gasoline cheaper (and healthier!), and everyone would've benefitted. But Kettering & Midgley went on an extensive PR campaign after their invention to convince the public leaded gasoline was safe, and they had GM and Dupont's full advertising budgets at their disposal. The public wouldn't know any better, so they believe what they're told and leaded gasoline becomes the standard.
You can hear echoes of that with many Facebook advertising & misinformation campaigns today.
This also causes stock market bubbles & crashes. People are supposed to independently value securities, and then their errors cancel out and you get a very good statistical approximation of true value. Instead, they invest in what everyone else invests in in, until prices have been bid up to insane levels, then run out of gullible buyers and the price crashes.
And brand-based monopoly. Instead of judging product quality for themselves, they buy products that all their friends are buying, "trusted brands", and this creates a barrier to entry that new entrants have a very hard time surmounting.
Democracy is affected too. In theory, the best candidate should win. In practice, the candidate with the most money to buy ads wins. People's opinions are mutable; they don't rationally seek out information independently and make an informed, self-interested choice. They tend to trust what they hear a lot, which creates a market for influencing people's opinions.
I can't think of a way to solve this, though. The "solution" would be to go from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, where everybody basically assumes that whatever they're told is a lie and ignores it. Societies like this have much higher transaction costs, much lower rates of innovation, and much higher rates of violence, which is not an improvement.
I've always argued that modern (late-stage?) capitalism and state socialism have similar failure modes. In state socialism, the Politburo controlled economic distribution and used their power to enrich themselves and their buddies. In many modern capitalist systems politicians are captured by economic interests and so large corporations play the same role that the Politburo played in state socialist systems.
The failure modes always center around the capture of popular opinion, whether through explicit buy-in from the state or through aggressive PR campaigns.
If ethanol was so effective as an anti-knocking agent why didn’t gas stations just mix ethanol with petrol and sold that fuel with profit? Ethanol is cheaper and much safer to manufacture then tetraethyllead. But they didn’t…
I am not an expert on combustion engines but the biggest problem with ethanol in the early days was it polluted the engine with water that it absorbed as a water soluble organic compound. Those days engines were not made from Aluminium but iron so it destroyed motors over time due to the formation of rust. Furthermore, production of tetraethyllead got much cheaper once its synthesis was automated. Knocking itself is bad for motors so people actually wanted to use anti-knocking additives to improve the longevity of their cars (aside of better fuel economy).
So in the end tetraethyllead prevailed as an anti-knocking agent because of its technical and economical advantages and not because of a conspiracy of oil companies as the article suggests.
Actually mixing ethanol with petrol is a pretty common thing...
The main issue stations won't do it unless compelled is that it will reduce gas mileage slightly. You don't want to be the company selling gas that has a lower mileage. If they could sell it at a lower price that would be something.
The thing is that you need a lot more ethanol than tetraethyllead, so it actually does end up being more expensive, for the same energy.
And actually cast iron blocks are still being used nowadays.
Ethanol also sucks in water from the atmosphere which causes big problems if not adequately managed. Especially ‘back in the day’, the technology to do so was very poor - even keeping a gas tank somewhat sealed against rain was difficult and often didn’t happen well.
Modern plastics, better valves, better treatment chemicals all mean it’s less of a problem now - but it is still a major problem and kills a lot of small engines in particular in states where all gas is some kind of ethanol blend.
We did have the tech in the 1960s to make gas tanks that were sealed against the rain, actually.
While yes ethanol is hygroscopic, 10% ethanol won't cause issues even in old vehicles (see people with old motorcycles) unless you keep it in for a long time without use.
Against the rain is not sufficient - it has to be sealed against atmospheric moisture at higher concentrations. 10% ethanol isn’t terrible at this - but the discussion was running on ethanol vs gas right?
If running ‘pure’ ethanol, it’s still really hard to not have engines die or fuel handling not contaminate it. It’s not an easy thing to keep pure enough, and is even a bit corrosive compared to gasoline.
No, the discussion isn't about ethanol vs gas. It's about adding some ethanol to gas in order to reduce knocking. That means 10-15% ethanol.
I agree that 100% ethanol would require hermetic seals, but this is about ethanol as an additive.
GM were considering using ethanol as an additive, not 100% ethanol fuel. That would require massively changing up the engine anyways and wouldn't be compatible with straight gas.
And at least in small engines, it's common to have an aluminum block with cast iron sleeves, so the combustion chamber is still walled with rustable metal.
Conspiracy: n. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
The word conspiracy doesn't mean the same as "conspiracy theory" and even that doesn't necessarily imply something wacky like reptilian aliens secretly controlling the government.
> perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine
Absolutely. In my country, the engines of nearly all cars run on any mix of gasoline and ethanol. I always have the option to choose. I've even seen cars running on natural gas, seems to be the only thing keeping things profitable for Uber drivers these days.
Corporations should have no control over anything to begin with. Monopolists ruin everything. The damage they've done to the western world cannot be calculated.
> What governing system would have mass produced ethenol as the best antiknocker with no regard to the interests of top players?
All we needed was strong environmental protection at the time. It's a natural commons, ripe for protection and regulation. But "The Environment" wasn't a common concept at the time.
Free markets work as long as there's competition. When companies become so big they can kill any nascent competitor on a whim, that's when it becomes an issue. That's why trust busting and regulations and governments are necessary.
I've had this argument many times with my friends who are libertarian leaning and they start hand waving when you bring up a 100 different examples of companies being downright evil when they became too large.
I usually go back to the East Indian Tea company and work my way forward. I love my Libertarian friends as far as social and individual rights are concerned (something Republicans seem to have given up on, except for the 2nd amendment) but have lively debates on limits on capitalism, even though I am a capitalist with asterisk marks and think Communism is a terrible form of government.
No, just tax or outlaw this behavior, don't nationalize industries.
There is an intellectual framework in place for making sense of leaded petrol in the context of markets, and that's externalities. It is no different in concept to noise pollution, carbon pollution, or other types of externalities, it is just one that's significantly worse.
Leaded petrol is at best a negative externality which should be taxed, and probably should just be considered physical assault similar to punching someone in the face (the user of the petrol is giving others literal brain damage) and totally banned and criminalized.
Yes - brought to you by the same people that would stop you from eating beef because cows fart.
From a tech perspective tetraethyl lead also has lubricative properties that add to exhaust valve longevity under high temperature conditions which may be one of the reasons it took so long to disappear.
"The temperature for Lead deposits to form tend to be favourable around the spark plugs (as the whole mixture is quite cool before the flame starts to propagate) and on the exhaust valve stem (as the mixture cools after combustion). The problem is that the deposits are electrically conductive, which shorts out the spark plug - and corrosive, which can start to attack the metal of the valve stems."
I am not sure it should be formulated as market vs. government. The general public can be quite short sighted too. Also, marketing can be used on the general public.
What I think would be improvements are protections to free speech. More specifically, removal of any obstacle to free speech. The next thing, and in line with this is very generous protections to whistle blowing. There could be a yearly award with elections by the public that chooses the whistle blower of the year. The price money should be enough to live on for some tens of years at the least, perhaps even for life. Also, winning the price should make a person immune to lawsuits related to the issue that the whistle blowing was about.
Free markets have zero incentive to correct for negative externalities by themselves. Free markets also want to become non-free through monopolization. These are the two classic cases of market failure, and the reason no actual economist (or, really, anyone who has read and understood an Econ 101 textbook) believes in unregulated free markets.
If I get you right you're disappointed that free markets didn't lead to 100% efficiency. IMO the simple truth is that nothing will be perfect and there's always strange patterns emerging from the chaos. It's almost like entropy to me.
>I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change
I'm with you here - especially including the observation that it was the non-free market force ("It couldn’t be patented") that skewed the choice in favor of the inferior, poisonous option.
Side note, besides its anti-knock properties, the lead also had protective effect on the valves - with early metallurgy, the high temperature gasses wore out valves, in particular the exhaust ones; lead partly ameliorated that. It is a concern with older vehicles (aircraft and cars) and they may require leaded gasoline for that particular reason - or at least replacement of relevant engine parts.
That only applies to car engines; aviation piston engines evolve much slower and commonly required leaded gasoline til recently - specifically for the lead content, beyond the anti-knock properties. Most common avgas is 100LL, with significant (if reduced) lead content.
Cf.
>Lycoming provides a list of engines and fuels that are compatible with them. According to their August 2017 chart, a number of their engines are compatible with unleaded fuel.
>However, all of their engines require that an oil additive be used when unleaded fuel is used: "When using the unleaded fuels identified in Table 1, Lycoming oil additive P/N LW-16702, or an equivalent finished product such as Aeroshell 15W-50, must be used."*
Aircraft piston engine makers like Lycoming and TCM have never provided any actual evidence that unleaded avgas increases engine wear. Their assertions that leaded gas provides lubrication are anecdotal and borderline superstitious. TCM pretty much admits this in its literature:
"Field experience has determined the use of unleaded automotive gasoline to be the cause of premature cylinder replacement due primarily to rapid and severe valve seat recession." [1]
They don't ever present evidence from controlled testing that backs up their "field experience". And controlled testing of automotive engines has shown that leaded fuels don't provide any significant protection. [2]
Twenty years ago, aviation writer John Deakin issued a challenge for anyone to provide good evidence that leaded avgas prevents engine wear [3]. As far as I know that challenge was never met .
> it was the non-free market force ("It couldn’t be patented") that skewed the choice
Interesting, because my take on patent law is that it exists to encourage capitalism. Specifically, to reward the risk takers that develop novel ideas (leading to positive change?).
Removal of the patent system would be the "free market purist" answer to this one. Though ethanol already wasn't patented, hmm.... I can only assume the leaded fuel was cheaper.
> Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business?
These will be derided as loss-makers by a surprisingly large contingent, and they'll defeat the whole purpose (when they can) by changing the approach so it either turns a profit, or fails entirely (see the US Postal Service, which always delivers, including on unprofitable routes)
I'm not sure what you mean by your reference to a free market. Patents are a government-granted monopoly, violation of which can get you fined or jailed. If a company hurts people because hurting people allows them to make money from a patent, that's not a failure of the free market, it's a failure of government control.
Unless you mean that you're disheartened that the government doesn't allow a free market here, and you wish they would?
It was banned and has been banned for almost 40 years? Obviously not in plane engines, which were a much smaller % of the pollution. You can't just ban it which in turn bans avgas. That's just dumb, it has to be phased out and alternatives developed. Sounds like those exist currently but aren't being pushed.
"Phasing it out" is the same as banning it some time in the future. Why should alternatives be developed if you can just keep using it indefinitely? R&D is not free.
> I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening
> What are the solutions to this?
Not believing in propagandist fairy tales? The "free" market is clearly a lie, it's a false front around capitalists seeking to maximize profit based in the regulatory framework(s) that government(s) have stood up. These frameworks aren't respected for their actual spirit either, instead exploited to their literal letter at every moment.
To see someone on a logical forum like HN espouse a childish idea like "the free market will make an efficient solution", with none of the subtext that the solution is exclusively to the problem of making money, just shows how effective that propaganda is.
Instead, acknowledge reality: incentives control actions, and capitalist incentives exclusively are to make money and control markets. Captive markets make more money, so they will work towards aspects of the regulatory frameworks that they can use to keep others out.
There is no goodwill from corporations. There is no environmental concern from corporations. There is no concern on social impact from corporations. There are no morals in corporations. There is profit maximization techniques and nothing else.
The free market has seen capitalists destroy our world with barely an impressive invention along the way.
The problem, in all cases, remains the long standing oligarch families and aristocratically rooted institutions, and their captive “public service” institutions, some of which are global in scope. Not wishing to engender a flaming thread, I will simply state that certain aspects of “institutional capture” are very much du jour topics of global interest and impact.
A global reset of “free markets” via a ‘day zero of capital accumulations’ could provide a solution. Many of the established capital hordes are legacies of activities that are now understood to be anti-social at best, and predatory at the extreme.
Coupled with this, we need pedagogical guidance to inform the new generations who are not to manor born. Almost none of the new blood born to middle or lower classes are educated in the necessities of generational wealth preservation and applications of wealth towards affecting societal outcomes. At best, we have children of Marxists and pseudo-Marxists railing against “Capital” without understanding the dynamics of societal power based on multi-generational societal networks, which transcend mere capital.
Primary sources working against such a program are precisely the “entertainment” complexes owned stock, lock, and barrel by informed and purposive societal networks, which at this point in human history have fully transcended ethnic and national boundaries, and clearly aim for stupefying the masses. There is a reason you have been treated to 2 decades of Marvel comics in films.
But from the perspective of GM, Kitman wrote, ethanol wasn’t an option. It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production. And oil companies like Du Pont "hated it," he wrote, perceiving it to be a threat to their control of the internal combustion engine.
I'm generally an avid beliver in free markets as an agent for positive change, so these types of "revelations" are really disheartening. What are the solutions to this? What governing system would have mass produced ethenol as the best antiknocker with no regard to the interests of top players?
Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business?