[lbo-talk] Violent crime and ... leaded gasoline

[andie_nachgeborenen]

Ethanol is something that I know a lot about from a case I worked on involving it. You can't patent lead either, but you can patent ways of producing ethanol and probably specific mixes of both gas and lead and or ethanol. The problem with ethanol as an antiknock agent was that our ethanol producing capacity was way under what was needed, still is, though much less so, as late as the 1970s. In addition ethanol, or the grain it is made of, has to be shipped from the Midwest to elsewhere, and ethanol is highly corrosive. Our pipeline system was inadequate to the task until the 1990s or early 2000s.and while the effects if lead were known to be bad, there was a lot less concern about those things when it was introduced, just generally. Finally, when lead  was banned, the nonethanol replacement, MTBE, that was adopted, turned out to have serious problems of its own. (That is what the case I worked on was about.) So it's not so simple and evil as you make out. Oil companies are wicked, but not everything they do is driven by a conscious desire to maximize both profits and harm to the public.

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 18, 2013, at 7:16 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:


> I recall reading an article in the Nation making a similar argument a
> couple of years ago.  The article claimed that the effects of lead on
> human health were well known at the time it was introduced as a
> gasolione additive.  However, its alternative, ethanol, could not be
> patented, so the industry went with lead additives that could.
> Ratfuckers!
> 
> This brings us to a question concerning politics.  On the one hand,
> there is a social impact of technology and products it allows on
> society.  That impact is, in almost every case, a mixed bag, some of
> it is positive, some of it is negative, and some of it is unclear.  On
> the other hand, there is a political impact of ownership or marketing
> of that technology on society, which depends not on the technology
> itself, but on the balance of political power and the role of business
> and political lobbies in that balance.
> 
> Both aspects must be taken into consideration when discussing social
> effect of any technology.  However, since the social impact of
> technology itself  is for the most part a mixed bad, the political
> impact is the decisive factor in most circumstances.  In this country,
> business lobbies and right wing groups used ownership of certain
> technologies, such as automobile or fire arms, as a right wing
> mobilization strategy aimed to neutralize liberal and left wing
> political position, and to subvert democratic governance by buying
> political influence.
> 
> For that reason, opposition to political measures favoring these
> technologies is the only rational strategy the left-of-the center in
> this country can take,  That is to say, any discussion about the
> technical aspects and social impacts of these technologies is a red
> herring - an obfuscation of the fact that these technologies are being
> used as tools for political mobilization for the right.  And as such
> they should be opposed by any means necessary, and any attempt to
> bring the social or technical consequences into the discussion should
> be viewed as right wing trolling aimed divide political opponents of
> the business and right wing interests.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Wojtek
> 
> "An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
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