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.

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.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

My country did that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

That form of belief gets fixed in your mind via a very different method to beliefs such as "what goes up must come down".

It's not a result of distilling evidence.

It's a result of persuasion.

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.

But there was an economic incentive to use TEL, so the free market prioritized profits.

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.

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.

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)

Unless you mean that you're disheartened that the government doesn't allow a free market here, and you wish they would?

> 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.

So it's not just free markets.

Sometimes giving away an invention for free (or finding a non-patentable alternative) makes you more money because it’s not a barrier to adoption.

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.