Leaded petrol was safe. Its inventor was sure of it.

Facing sceptical reporters at a press conference in October 1924, Thomas Midgley dramatically produced a container of tetraethyl lead – the additive in question – and washed his hands in it.

“I’m not taking any chance whatever,” Midgley declared. “Nor would I… doing that every day.”

Midgley was – perhaps – being a little disingenuous. He had recently spent several months in Florida, recuperating from lead poisoning.

Some of those who’d made Midgley’s invention hadn’t been so lucky, which is why reporters were interested.

On the Thursday of the week before Midgley’s press conference, at a Standard Oil plant in New Jersey, a worker named Ernest Oelgert started hallucinating. By Friday, he was running around the laboratory, screaming in terror.

On Saturday, with Oelgert dangerously unhinged, his sister called the police. He was taken to hospital and forcibly restrained. By Sunday, he was dead. Within the week, so were four of his colleagues – and 35 more were in hospital.

Only 49 people worked there.

‘The loony gas building’
None of this surprised workers elsewhere in Standard Oil’s facility. They knew there was a problem with tetraethyl lead.

As Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner note in their book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, the lab where it was developed was known as “the loony gas building”.

Nor should it have shocked Standard Oil, General Motors or the DuPont Corporation, the three companies involved with adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline.

The first production line in Ohio had already been shut down after two deaths. A third plant elsewhere in New Jersey had also seen fatalities. Workers kept hallucinating insects – the lab was known as “the house of butterflies”.

Better working practices could make tetraethyl lead safe to produce. But was it really sensible to add it to petrol, when the fumes would be belched out on to city streets?

About a century ago, when General Motors had first proposed adding lead to petrol – in order to improve performance – scientists were alarmed. They urged the government to investigate the public health implications.

Midgley breezily assured the surgeon general that “the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption”, although he conceded that “no actual experimental data has been taken”.

General Motors funded a government bureau to conduct some research, adding a clause saying it had to approve the findings.

Risky, but useful?
The bureau’s report was published amid the media frenzy over Oelgert’s poisoned workmates. It gave tetraethyl lead a clean bill of health and was met with some scepticism.

Under pressure, the government organised a conference in Washington DC in May 1925. The debate there exemplified the two extremes of approach to any new idea that looks risky, but useful.

In one corner: Frank Howard, vice-president of the Ethyl Corporation – a joint venture between General Motors and Standard Oil. He called leaded petrol a “gift of God”, arguing that “continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilization”.

In the other corner: Dr Alice Hamilton, the country’s foremost authority on lead.

She argued leaded petrol was a chance not worth taking. “Where there is lead,” she said, “some case of lead poisoning sooner or later develops, even under the strictest supervision.”

Hamilton knew that lead had been poisoning people for thousands of years. In 1678, workers who made lead white – a pigment for paint – were described as suffering ailments including “dizziness in the head, with continuous great pain in the brows, blindness, stupidity”.

The Romans used lead in water pipes. Lead miners often ended up mad or dead – and some correctly intuited that low-level, long-term exposure was also unwise.

“Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead,” wrote the civil engineer Vitruvius, 2,000 years ago. “This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour.”

Read more: BBC News

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The electric future is coming. But how quickly is less certain.

Just a decade and a half ago, the then-CEO of General Motors Co. Rick Wagoner observed to Larry Burns, at the time GM’s head of research and strategy, that not many industries stay the same for a century. But the automobile industry, Wagoner added with some anxiety, had so far been the exception. Its business model remained that pioneered by Henry Ford with the Model T a century earlier — “gas-fueled, run by an internal combustion engine, rolling on four wheels.” “What’s the car of the next hundred years going to look like?” Wagoner asked.

Recently, I asked Wagoner about that conversation. “The focus then was on making the internal combustion engine better,” he replied. “I was asking, ‘If we were starting the industry today, what would be different?’”

A pretty clear answer about how different came earlier this month from President Joe Biden when he issued an executive order setting out the goal that “50 percent of all new passenger cars and light vehicles sold in 2030” should be electric. In the order, he instructed government agencies to implement regulatory policies to achieve that goal. “There’s a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen,” said the president. This vision clearly does not involve making the internal combustion engine better.

In response to government policies, automakers are committing many tens of billions of dollars over the next 10 years to EV development. Targets may be motivating. But no matter how much money is spent, shifting such a vast industrial and consumer ecosystem that is so basic to the economy faces big challenges, with the result that the share of new car sales that are EVS by 2030 will more likely be about 25 percent. The challenges still have to be met.

It was in 2008 that an initial glimmer of what is now Biden’s vision appeared with the arrival on the road of the first commercial electric car of modern times — the Tesla Roadster. At the time, the all-electric Roadster looked like a novelty. Moreover, its appearance was somewhat accidental. Five years earlier, a young electric vehicle enthusiast, J.B. Straubel, had lunch at a fish restaurant in Los Angeles with Elon Musk, trying to convince him about the potential of an electric plane. When Musk showed no interest, Straubel switched to an electric car. It was an idea originally championed by Thomas Edison more than a century ago, but which had failed in the face of the Model T. But in 2008, Musk jumped at the idea. Some years later, Musk said that without that lunch, “Tesla wouldn’t exist, basically.”

The Roadster, starting at over $100,000, was not exactly a mass market car. But there soon were other early entrants. Nissan, where engineers had been working on an electric car for more than two decades, introduced the Nissan Leaf in 2010, the same year that General Motors came out with the Chevy Volt. GM followed up in 2016 with the Bolt, a major project accomplished in double-time under the then-head of development and now-CEO Mary Barra.

Now let us fast forward just a few years. Today, automakers around the world are racing to catch up with Tesla and bring out a full slate of electric vehicles. General Motors has set the goal of going all-electric by 2035. Mercedes just leapfrogged with a goal of being all-electric for light vehicles by 2030. “The EV shift is picking up speed. … The tipping point is getting closer,” Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius said last month. “This step marks a profound reallocation of capital.”

The No. 1 factor speeding the shift to EVs is governments putting an increasingly heavy foot on the accelerator. The European Union is proposing tough regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from cars made or sold in Europe that would effectively ban the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines after 2035. California and Massachusetts similarly have announced ambitions to ban new cars with internal combustion engines by 2035. Biden has now upped the ante by pressing automakers for that 50 percent electric goal by 2030. Governments around the world are also fueling consumers’ purchases of EVs with generous tax incentives and subsidies, and emission standards are becoming ever more stringent. Just this month, the Biden administration proposed tougher fuel efficiency standards in the U.S. This will drive up the cost of conventional cars with the aim of pushing more new car buyers to switch to electric instead. In Shanghai, China, the city offers free license plates for what Beijing calls “new energy vehicles,” while consumers must go through an auction to get a license plate for a car with a traditional engine.

Read more: POLITICO

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One of the worst forms of transport for CO2 emissions is domestic and short haul flying. Research from the BBC via BEIS/Defra in 2019 revealed that flights on routes of 700km (438 miles) or less produce 29% more CO2 per person per km or mile travelled than longer flights. But self-driving battery-electric vehicles could drastically reduce the need for this form of transport, or even render it obsolete, and slash emissions in the process.

The BBC research argued that a domestic flight would produce 254 g/km of CO2 per passenger, compared to 195 g/km for long haul. In contrast, even a diesel car emits just 171 g/km on average. Stick a family of four in it and that drops to 43 g/km. People don’t choose their transportation based on carbon footprint that much yet, though, even if that is changing. The reason short haul flights are popular is speed.

A flight from London to Edinburgh takes around 1.5 hours. Even if you factor in another 1.5 hours to check in, an hour to get to the airport, and another hour at the end to reach your final destination, that is still only 5 hours in total. Driving it yourself, it would take 7.5-8 hours if you’re lucky, and you’d probably have to stop halfway for a break. You would also be tired when you arrived, so this would not be a good solution if you plan to spend a day in meetings once you reach your destination.

Of course, trains can be extremely low carbon, but they are generally slower than flying. Going back to that BBC report, domestic rail is 41 g/km per passenger and the Eurostar from London to Paris an incredible 6g/km. But in the UK and in other parts of the world, trains are an expensive form of transport – often more than flying – and you still have the inconvenience of having to go to a station to take a train. That probably won’t take as long as going to an airport, but it can add a couple of hours to the trip. So the 4.5-hour train journey from London to Edinburgh might take about the same time door-to-door as driving, and a few hours more than flying.

This is where self-driving electric cars could dramatically alter the balance. In theory, a BEV emits 0 g/km, although that entails using entirely renewable energy sources. Let’s say we’re sticking with the UK and that London to Edinburgh journey but using the average UK grid balance. Last year, the UK national grid averaged 181g of CO2 per kWh – its greenest year yet. Most BEVs manage at least 3 miles per kWh, and some more than 4 miles per kWh. But let’s assume the worst and say 3. That gives us 60g of CO2 per mile, or 37.5 g/km. Put four people in the car, and it drops to 9.4 g/km per person – in other words, much better than UK domestic rail or coach travel, and getting close to the electrified Eurostar.

Read more: Forbes

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