The final results are not yet in, but it’s pretty certain that 2024 is going to be the hottest year on record. Practically every week this year, we heard of some new daily or monthly record being broken, some extreme weather event made more extreme than it would have been by human-caused climate change. In July exceptional rainfall led to flooding that triggered deadly landslides in the Kerala region of India, killing hundreds of people. In September, Hurricane Helene became one of the biggest storms to hit the U.S. Fueled by record-high ocean temperatures, the storm brought torrential rains and massive storm surges to the Southeast. At press time, the death toll from the hurricane had surpassed 230.
Sadly, reports of these events often provoke not shock, sadness or outrage but rather a sense of déjà vu, if not ennui. If 2024 does prove to be the hottest year ever measured, it will be the fifth time in less than a decade that we have faced such a grim fact. Perhaps for this reason, the response of the fossil-fuel industry is to shrug its shoulders and insist that, despite all the climate damage that fossil fuels cause, we just can’t live without them. In a white paper published earlier this year, KinderMorgan, which owns and operates pipelines, put it this way: “There is an enduring economic and social need for fossil fuels that will continue to play a central role in our lives.” ExxonMobil’s 2024 Global Outlook declares that “oil and natural gas remain vital” because they are “needed for modern life.”
What is essential to civilization is that we dramatically reduce our use of coal, oil and gas.
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Everyone involved in the energy and environment conversation knows any transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy will take time. Indeed, this is why it’s so consequential that the oil and gas industry has worked for decades to delay the transition, which even it now acknowledges is necessary.
The argument that we can’t live without a dangerous, even deadly product is an old one. In their new book on the history of health disparities in the U.S. (and the role of corporate America in creating and reinforcing many of those disparities), historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz recount an argument made 99 years ago, when the fossil-fuel industry defended an activity that would soon kill large numbers of people: putting lead in gasoline.
By the 1920s many people, most notably American physician and Harvard University professor Alice Hamilton, had become concerned about occupational exposure to toxic materials, such as lead, asbestos and mercury. Hamilton was an expert on lead poisoning, and some states had passed laws to limit exposure to toxic substances in the workplace, in part based on her work. When the oil industry decided to add lead to gasoline, Hamilton was concerned. The situation pitted her against some of the biggest names in American business, including industrialists Charles F. Kettering and Alfred P. Sloan and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller.
General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley, Jr., had discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline solved the problem of knocking—the noise caused by fuel burning unevenly or incompletely in an engine. Midgley worked under Kettering—GM’s head of research—who reported directly to Sloan, GM’s CEO. GM quickly contracted with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to put tetraethyl lead into gasoline. By 1923 the product was on the market.
But there was a catch. It had been known since classical antiquity that lead is highly toxic; Midgley himself had suffered a bout of lead poisoning as a result of his research. Many workers in industrial settings where lead was used became ill or died. So GM and DuPont—which would manufacture the tetraethyl lead—agreed the product would be marketed simply as “ethyl.”
It didn’t take long for scientists to voice concerns. According to Rosner and Markowitz, the U.S. surgeon general wrote to the chair of DuPont asking whether the companies had taken public health impacts into account. Midgley admitted that neither DuPont nor GM had collected any relevant data, but he nonetheless insisted that the amounts that an ordinary person would be exposed to would be harmless.
In 1925 the surgeon general organized a conference of businesspeople, union leaders, scientists, doctors and government officials to consider the matter. Given what Midgley told the surgeon general, one might expect the representatives of American industry to have insisted that lead in gasoline was safe. Instead they argued it was essential for the U.S. economy, for industrial progress, for the American way of life.
Kettering contended that because oil supplies were limited, anything that improved efficiency had to be viewed as indispensable. Standard Oil’s lawyers and engineers stated at the conference: “Our continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilization.”
In later years, industry representatives and defenders would repeatedly reprise this theme. True, some workers got sick or even died, but this was the price of progress. The editor of the journal Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering asserted that “casualties” from lead “were negligible compared to human sacrifice in the development of many other industrial enterprises.”
In 1965 California Institute of Technology geochemist Clair C. Patterson estimated that the blood lead level of many Americans was more than 100 times what it would be from natural causes and well above what was known to cause at least low-level lead poisoning. Meanwhile other scientific studies were proving that even low levels of lead exposure could cause neurotoxicity, with alarming effects on intelligence and behavior. In 1973 the U.S. began a gradual phaseout of leaded gasoline. In 2021 Algeria became the last country to ban it.
When lead was removed from gas, the positive effects were dramatic. One study found that between 1976 and 1995, mean American blood lead levels dropped 90 percent. Moreover, the scaremongering predictions of Midgley and Co. did not come true. Not only did the American economy not collapse when leaded gasoline for cars was phased out, but it took only a few short years for car manufacturers to redesign engines to operate with unleaded gas. Leaded gasoline was not essential to civilization, and neither are fossil fuels. What is essential to civilization is that we dramatically reduce our use of coal, oil and gas—the largest contributors to the existential threat of global climate change—and thereby set our planet on a path toward a safer future.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
