The global phase-out of leaded fuel represents a “milestone for multilateralism”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday, marking the end of a 20-year campaign to eliminate a major threat to the health of people and the planet.
“Lead in fuel has run out of gas – thanks to the cooperation of governments in developing nations, thousands of businesses and millions of ordinary people,” he said.
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#Air Pollution
#Government Policies
#Greenhouse Gas Emissions
#Health
#Oil
#Water Pollution
Atlantis Viewpoint
For thousands of years people had been poisoned by lead. The first clear descriptions of lead toxicity dated back to the second century BC. Already at the time of the Roman Empire, they used lead, among other things, for aqueducts. They realized that water running through mud pipes was healthier than water running through lead pipes. That was 2,000 years ago. However, despite the toxicity of the material, in 1921, a chemist at the automaker General Motors, discovered that by adding the tetraethyl component - derived from lead - engines ran more efficiently.
The problem of burning a toxic product is that it is released into the air we breathe and it stays there, we breathe it in and the lead is absorbed in to our bodies. For decades millions of cars around the world have been poisoning our streets and our air. Thankfully, after 60 years of use, its use was been banned by many developed countries in the 1980’s and finally its use has been eradicated by 2021, avoiding more than 1,2 million premature deaths every year.
However, our continued use of petrol in cars and the burning of fossil fuels for other transportation, industry and energy, is having a terrible effect on our health and on our world even more than lead ever did. So just to fix one component of our fuel source for cars has taken almost a century to eradicate. We know we should not be using fossil fuels at all, but how long will it take to remove this fuel source from so many areas of our lives….? This does not look very hopefully for the future if it takes us a century to only alter one fuel source, when what we need to do now is completely change all of our fuel sources!
We don’t need to give up on advancement and progress, we just need to use the right tools and fuels to power our future. Green hydrogen can power so many of our systems and can be produced from True Clean Energy sources. No air pollution, no Greenhouse gases, a clean future.
