Tomlinson: Millennials and Gen Z are smarter than baby boomers thanks to chemical companies' mistake
HIF USA wants to capture CO2 emissions and turn them into carbon neutral fuels. The company is considering a site in Matagorda County for a plant.If you are a baby boomer and think millennials and Gen Z’ers seem cleverer than you, it’s because they are.
From the 1930s through the 1990s, oil companies added lead to gasoline to make engines run smoother, forcing two generations to breathe leaded air. Older generations have five fewer IQ points on average because they grew up breathing those fumes,In the early days of automobiles, fuel would sometimes combust unequally inside the cylinders, damaging the engine and creating a knocking sound. In 1921, mechanical engineer Thomas Midgley discovered that adding lead to gasoline stopped the knocking.
Within a few years, all refiners added tetraethyllead to gasoline and called it Ethyl. No one would have blamed Midgley for the brain damage foisted on generations if he hadn’t known any better. But he did, and so did a lot of others.century. Harvard Medical School Professor Alice Hamilton told General Motors and DuPont that selling Ethyl would cause widespread poisoning before they launched it.
In 1924, five refinery workers died, and 35 became acutely ill -- including Midgely -- from lead poisoning while blending Ethyl. But under pressure from big corporations, the federal government ignored Hamilton and other critics and allowed leaded gasoline on the market.In the long run, Hamilton was right, and Midgley was wrong. The mass poisoning became evident, with doctors and environmentalists demanding an end to leaded gasoline.
The Environmental Protection Agency forced the automobile industry to phase out leaded gasoline in the 1970s. Those old enough will remember people like my grandfather who groused about the decision for years, denouncing liberal environmentalists for overblowing the problem.
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