-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- Big Lead Fights Back Tetraethyl lead was no longer GM's concern. Nor was it the concern of other auto makers, who followed suit announcing that they too would adopt the catalyst to meet ever-tightening federal emissions standards. Du Pont and Ethyl, on the other hand--along with a ragtag bunch of cheapskate oilmen who hoped to avoid upgrading their refineries to produce unleaded gasoline of sufficiently high octane--still cared a lot about American sales of TEL. When the EPA launched the first of several halfhearted attempts to begin removing lead from gasoline, lead's corporate affinity group fought back with a ferocity that bespoke major arrogance and even greater desperation. No sooner had the EPA announced a scheduled phaseout, setting a reduced lead content standard for gasoline in 1974, than it was sued by Ethyl and Du Pont, who claimed they had been deprived of property rights. In that same year, a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set aside the EPA's lead regulations as "arbitrary and capricious." Ethyl had argued that "actual harm" must be shown, not just "significant risk," before their product could be outlawed, and the panel agreed. That Ethyl could make the argument at all was a troubling reminder that the executive and legislative branches of the United States government had signally failed to heed the Surgeon General's committee's original request for funding in 1926 for more independent research, leaving the driving, scientifically speaking, to Robert Kehoe. In 1976 the full United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit overturned the decision against the EPA, finding that "significant risk" was adequate foundation for the agency's action against lead and within its authority. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a longtime Ethyl director when he was a Virginia corporate lawyer, didn't need to recuse himself, as the Court refused to hear an appeal brought by TEL makers Ethyl, Du Pont, Nalco and PPG, as well as the National Petroleum Refiners Association and four oil companies. Ethyl's excitable Blanchard lashed out, "The whole proceeding against an industry that has made invaluable contributions to the American economy for more than fifty years is the worst example of fanaticism since the New England witch hunts in the Seventeenth Century." * * * Fighting on the beaches and fighting on the seas, an impassioned Ethyl wasn't going to go down easy, urging a reprieve for leaded fuel at a 1979 meeting of the Petrochemical Energy Group. Soon after, the company's oil industry amigos would sound the alarm for a mysterious "octane crisis" on account of an alleged increase in competition for aromatics, crude oil components that are mainstays of the plastics and synthetics businesses, as well as unleaded gasoline octane boosters. To combat the crisis, they requested an EPA slowdown on the gradual phaseout of lead. The petrochemical industry--led by Du Pont, Monsanto and Dow--would simultaneously launch an intensive lobbying campaign to delay the scheduled lead phaseout, charging, in a reminiscent tack, that the newly discovered dearth of aromatics "threatens the jobs of the 14 million Americans directly dependent and the 29 million Americans indirectly dependent on the petrochemical industry for employment." The ever-hopeful lead cabal's dreams were cruelly dashed in early 1982, after word leaked out of Vice President George Bush's Task Force on Regulatory Relief that the newly elected Reagan Administration planned to relax or eliminate the US lead phaseout. Recognizing its cue, Du Pont formally called upon the EPA to rescind all lead regulations. EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch was only too pleased to comply, but she unwittingly launched a firestorm of bad publicity in advance of an announcement by telling a visiting refiner with a big mouth that she would not enforce violations of current lead limits because the regulations would soon be repealed. When Gorsuch's remarks appeared in the newspapers (and were lampooned in the comic strip Doonesbury), Reagan's EPA would, under heavy political pressure, strike a compromise that effectively sped up the phaseout. Once again, Ethyl had been let down by old friends. The New Science of Lead Ethyl and Octel continued to whine, but by 1984 the health benefits of America's lead phaseout had become too remarkable to ignore, and it was this fact that ultimately ended lead's reign in America. The harmful effects of lead at lower and lower concentrations had been shown by independent studies in the late seventies and early eighties, and by now PHS was at long last settling in with the antilead camp. EPA economist Joel Schwartz, assigned by his Reaganaut superiors to examine the impact of the lead phaseout on small refiners preparatory to phasing lead back in, went rogue and reported back instead on the impact of the phaseout's early years on American blood-lead levels, which the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had been independently compiling. The CDC's findings were startling, contradicting everything leadheads of the Kehoe school held dear. Between 1976 and 1980 the EPA would report, the amount of lead consumed in gasoline dropped 50 percent. Over the same period, blood-lead levels dropped 37 percent. The EPA estimated that the public benefits of the phaseout, which included reduced medical costs and lower maintenance for cars, had already exceeded costs by $700 million. Between 1975 and 1984 lead for gasoline consumption dropped 73 percent, while ambient air lead decreased 71 percent [see graph in printed issue]. The Lead Industries Association was so angry with the data the EPA had corralled that in June 1984 it sued the CDC, which had impaneled its lead experts to prepare an updated statement on childhood lead poisoning for the nation's medical and public health community (the suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds). Schwartz told The Nation that the collection of lead data was hindered by the Reagan Administration, which, early in its term, prohibited the CDC from requiring lead-screening programs to report results to it, figures that it would then publish each quarter in the scientific journal Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Reports. Subsequently, the CDC was prohibited from even inquiring about lead-screening program results. As more impartial studies were funded, however, the common-sense objections to leaded gas raised by public health campaigners in the twenties only seemed more prescient. Yandell Henderson, Alice Hamilton, David Edsall and numerous other eminent public health scholars had precisely predicted the problem sixty years earlier, before it became a global condition. Sadly, they were ignored. Dispersed into the air in automobile exhaust, lead dust would be no more healthy than it was when lead smelting was identified as a poisonous pastime 3,000 years ago. Moreover, as with many industrial toxins, the perceived acceptable level of exposure fell as further studies were finally carried out. In the fifties and sixties, blood-lead levels of less than 60 micrograms (a microgram is a millionth of a gram) per deciliter (one-tenth of a liter) of blood (mcg/dl) were considered acceptable by America's medical establishment, not requiring intervention, because overt symptoms of lead poisoning, such as convulsions, do not typically occur below this level. Prior to that, dating back to the twenties, lead poisoning usually had to be severe enough to cause death or severe brain damage to be considered a diagnosed poisoning event. A corresponding blood-lead level of 80-100 mcg/dl or possibly higher might be imputed. In the intervening years, the acceptable level has dropped steadily from 40 mcg/dl to 30 to 25 and now to 10 or below. * * * Though the lead industry advocacy groups cling to the old numbers, the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences have agreed that the ill-health effects beginning at 10 mcg/dl are established fact, "an unprecedented coherence of opinion in the field of neurotoxicology." In 1994 a letter to the editors of the medical journal Pediatrics, several prominent lead research doctors addressing industry naysayers wrote, "If this massive database is not persuasive for lead, then no other chemical can be considered to have been demonstrated to be toxic." Completing a sequence familiar to pollution watchers, a recent review of scientific research by the National Research Council has led it to conclude, "There is growing evidence that there is no effective threshold for some of the adverse effects of lead." Children are especially at risk. Summarizing its study of the relevant science, the Department of Housing and Urban Development wrote, "There does not yet appear to be a discernible threshold for the adverse effects of lead on the young." In a 90,000-word 1997 review of all scientific evidence on the subject, Erik Millstone of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit at Sussex University concluded that children suffer ill effects from lead at especially low exposures--much lower than was thought even recently--including reduced IQ, behavioral and learning difficulties and hyperactivity. Children are 4-5 times more susceptible to the effects of lead than adults. According to the CDC this is because children's digestive systems absorb more lead than adults--40-50 percent of that ingested versus 10-15 percent. In addition to breathing it in, children will ingest large quantities of airborne lead when it settles on soil, dust, food and playthings, which eventually contact their mouths. Based on research linking the two, in 1998 the Justice Department began studying the impact of childhood lead exposure on juvenile delinquent behavior. Perhaps the only encouraging news in any discussion of leaded gasoline is how readily blood-lead levels fall when its use is trimmed or eliminated. The US phaseout of lead began in 1975 and was largely complete by 1986. Based on data collected in more than sixty US cities by the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that blood-lead levels in Americans aged 1-74 had declined 78 percent between 1978 and 1991. For children aged 1-5, blood-lead levels decreased 76 percent, from 15.0 to 3.6 mcg/dl. The percent of children with blood-lead levels greater than or equal to 10 micrograms declined from 88 percent to 9 percent. The British Medical Journal reported three years ago that since Britain's lead phaseout began, blood-lead levels there had fallen by two-thirds. In New York City, where the war against tetraethyl lead can be said to have first begun with its ban in 1925, Dr. Sergio Piomelli, a hematologist at Columbia University's Children's Hospital, has reported that before the US lead phaseout began, 30,000 out of 100,000 New York City children tested had elevated lead levels; after the phaseout was complete, 1,500 of 100,000 had similarly high levels. In 2000, he told The Nation, the affected population is even smaller. Still, one of the most telling measures of the extent of human lead contamination--careful measurement of lead levels in the bones of our preindustrial ancestors--argues against too much backslapping. A 1992 article in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that pre-Columbian inhabitants of North America had average blood-lead levels 625 times lower than the current "safe" level of 10 mcg/dl. Eastward, Ho! Foreign custom kept Ethyl in business, and it put Octel on the map. In the seventies, with the auto industry embracing catalytic converters and talk of a lead phaseout circulating, the US market seemed certain to shrink, making foreign profits increasingly important to the lead giants. Casting back over 1972 in its annual report for that year, Ethyl reminded shareholders, "Continued penetration of expanding world markets would lessen any...impact on Ethyl's total antiknock sales." The following year, noting growing reservations about the American market, it went on to recall: "Sales of antiknock compounds continued to increase in all overseas markets in 1973. To promote this growth, Ethyl International added antiknock bulk terminals in the Far East, Middle East and South America. Construction of other terminals in various areas of the world is planned in 1974 and 1975." Ethyl further elaborated its foreign strategy in 1974: "Most foreign countries have recognized the importance of the role lead antiknocks play in conserving crude oil in this period of shortages.... we believe antiknocks will continue to constitute a major product of the Company for years to come whether or not there is a domestic reduction in use of lead in gasoline." By 1979 the company would observe, "It is worth noting that during the second half of 1979, for the first time, Ethyl's foreign sales of lead antiknock compounds exceeded domestic sales." Ethyl and Octel both were additionally fortunate in being able to manipulate their prices to keep profit levels high. As Octel reported in a 1998 SEC filing, "From 1989 to 1995, the Company was able to substantially offset the financial effects of the declining demand for TEL through higher TEL pricing. The magnitude of these price increases reflected the cost effectiveness of TEL as an octane enhancer as well as the high cost of converting refineries to produce higher octane grades of fuel." In other words, they had their customers over a barrel. Lead for the Poor The sad, bitter fruit of Ethyl's and Octel's missionary work on behalf of leaded gasoline lies in its prevalence in the Third World today. Given the current state of knowledge regarding the hazards of lead, this constitutes a particularly egregious example of environmental racism. While more than 80 percent of the heaviest lead-using countries today are low income, 70 percent of low lead users (those that have phased out lead or allow only very low levels) are high income. While Americans cruise their freeways burning exclusively unleaded gasoline, as of 1996, 93 percent of all gasoline sold in Africa contained lead, 94 percent in the Middle East, 30 percent in Asia and 35 percent in Latin America. According to the World Bank, 1.7 billion urbanites in developing nations are in danger of lead poisoning, including neurological damage, high blood pressure and heart disease from airborne lead, 90 percent of which is attributable to leaded gasoline. Excessive exposure to lead causes 200,000-500,000 cases of hypertension in the Third World, with 400 deaths per year attributable to lead exposure in the late eighties. In Mexico City, one of the world's most polluted (and populous) cities, 4 million cars pump an estimated 32 tons of lead each day into the air. In Jakarta, one and a half tons enters the atmosphere every twenty-four hours. A research scientist with the Canadian National Water Research Institute performed roadside-dust analyses in Nigeria that revealed as much as 6,000 parts per million of lead. In the United States, lead dust is considered hazardous to children at 600 ppm [see chart in printed issue]. In Alexandria, Egypt, where gas is heavily leaded, concentrations of TEL and air-lead levels are often double the European Union's recommended level, and traffic controllers have been found to suffer central nervous system dysfunction. In Cairo more than 800 infants die annually because of maternal exposure to lead. Daytime air-lead levels in Buenos Aires have been measured at 3.9 grams per cubic meter versus the twenty-four-hour EU limit of 1 gram per cubic meter. * * * The continued use of TEL is especially troubling in light of the fact that the Third World's car population is multiplying rapidly, a situation that will only intensify if multinational automobile manufacturers have their way. Although the Chinese government has recently expressed its intention to remove lead from its fuel, other nations that haven't are already seeing vehicular population explosions like that predicted for China. Prodded by Western lead manufacturers, some countries have even allowed the lead content in their gasoline to be increased. Although it has since moved toward deleading its gasoline, India, for instance, more than doubled the amount of lead permitted in its gasoline (from 0.22 to 0.56 grams per liter) during the seventies and eighties; in Uganda, the number soared from 0.58 to 0.84 grams per liter, higher than was ever typical in the West. Never known for their philanthropy, refiners in poorer nations are disinclined to upgrade their refineries so as to obtain higher octane gasolines without using lead. Ironically, in the nineties the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, exported unleaded gasoline. But it was importing TEL and adding it to all gasoline sold for domestic use--this in the country with the greatest number of automobiles per capita in Latin America. By way of explanation, it is perhaps not unhelpful to know that several high-ranking officials of the state oil company held consultancies with companies that sell lead additives to the country. Among the consequences of this corrupt arrangement: According to a 1991 study 63 percent of newborns studied had blood-lead levels in excess of US "safe" levels. Environmental standards in Third World countries tend to be lax. Where clean-air laws and unleaded gasoline do not exist, there is no impetus for automobile manufacturers to install catalytic converters in their cars. With the rapid growth in automobile use and the growing size of these countries' fleets, coupled with low vehicle-turnover rates (car lives of fifteen years are not at all uncommon in low-income countries) and minimal maintenance, air pollution becomes a much greater hazard. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of India's pollution is generated today by vehicles, compared with only 24 percent in 1971; the WHO estimates that 7,500 deaths in New Delhi each year are related to air pollution. Finally, because lead ruins catalytic converters and fouls modern engine-management computers, leaded gasoline prevents motorists in these countries from using more efficient, less-polluting modern vehicles even if they want to. Where cars equipped with catalysts are sold as new or used vehicles, a predominantly leaded fuel supply invites motorists to either remove the air-cleansing catalysts or destroy them by filling their cars with leaded fuel. It's Cleanup Time The public health benefits and cost savings to societies of removing lead from gasoline are so vast that the business-friendly World Bank was moved--at a 1996 UN conference in Turkey, where leaded gas still accounts for 82 percent of the market--to call for a complete global phaseout. The bank calculated that the United States had saved more than $10 for every $1 it invested in its conversion to unleaded, by reducing health costs, saving on engine maintenance and improving fuel efficiency with modern engine technologies. Further claiming that no-lead fuel may increase engine life by as much as 150 percent, the bank called for an immediate five-year phaseout. (Buttressing the World Bank's public-spirited campaign, undoubtedly, is the realization that many of the state-owned oil companies currently producing leaded gasoline will require private investment--and possibly ownership--to finance refinery upgrades to produce high-octane unleaded fuels.) Unsurprisingly, the industry, which favors phaseouts of twenty-years' duration and more, responded testily: "Octel and the World Bank have been discussing the transition from leaded to unleaded gasoline for a long time," a spokesman told the Chemical Marketing Reporter in 1996. "It isn't really appropriate for the World Bank to apply US studies and data to the phaseout of lead in Third World countries." Ethyl and Octel both have strategies for dealing with Third World nations seeking to go unleaded. In separate interviews with The Nation, they admitted advising their remaining customers to go slow. As Ethyl's vice president of international sales, Bob Yondola, explained: "As countries have the infrastructure to support unleaded gasoline, have the monies for their people to buy the new cars, etc., etc., it makes sense [to switch to unleaded gas]. But if you've got some parts of the world where their infrastructure is still--you know, they need to come up with food and water, and sewers...for their people. And there are still places in the world like that. Then, I mean, getting the lead out of the gasoline, to me, wouldn't make as much sense as having sewers." Associated Octel's public affairs spokesman Bob Larbey, since retired, said his firm will help Third World refiners clean up their contaminated lead operations, for a fee. "But," he said, "we talk to developing countries. For example, refiners come to us and say, 'We want to get the lead out,' because we're refinery experts, you see, and we could advise them on how they could best phase lead out, with what strategy. I think if we argue anything at all, we say, 'Well, if you're going to go out of lead, fine, let's talk a bit, but there's no need, this is the lead in health information, there's no proven adverse health affect, and so there's no need for you to do it precipitously. You might not want to take twenty years [as in the European phaseout] but really, there's no need to rush.' Because if you replaced it with other components of petrol then there's a risk from anything.... Petrol itself is a risk without lead." * * * The lead industry clutches the alleged dangers of other octane-enhancing gasoline additives near to its bosom. While admitting the hazard of his company's product, one Octel executive told the New York Times that leaded fuel is an "economic and environmental bargain" for the Third World because it improves fuel economy, which lowers other emissions like benzene, also found in gasoline. "Getting rid of one environmental risk won't necessarily improve public health if you replace it with greater risks," yet another spokesman for Octel's affiliate told the Chemical Marketing Reporter. Benzene, the hazard to which lead enthusiasts refer most often, can be used by refiners to boost octane cheaply in the absence of lead. But it isn't mandatory, and any sensible lead-reduction regulation would limit its use. Moreover, while as many as 5,000 Americans died annually from lead-related heart disease prior to the lead phaseout, only forty-seven people developed cancer from the use of benzene as a lead replacement. "The health impacts of aromatics [like benzene] are several orders of magnitude less than that of lead," said a World Bank spokesperson. Diversification and Spinoff Selling lead is an unusually profitable business. As Ethyl's 1995 report to shareholders blandly observes, lead additive sales accounted for 26 percent of gross revenues, but 74 percent of its profit. In 1995 the New York Times wrote of the profit bonanza Octel's then-owner, Great Lakes Chemical, had stumbled upon when, searching for sources of bromine for fire retardants, it landed in the TEL business. Far from petering out, demand for leaded gasoline, while shrinking, has remained far stronger than anyone predicted, especially in the third world. Meanwhile, every other major producer has stopped making the additives, known as tetraethyl lead, or TEL. That has left Great Lakes with an unexpected flood of profits and 90 percent of a market that no one else will enter because of the environmental problems associated with lead and the huge capital costs of building a new plant. Octel's old plant, along the Manchester Ship Canal outside Liverpool, bankrolled immense growth for Great Lakes, allowing it to double in size within five years (to $5 billion in annual revenue) following its acquisition of Octel, all the while maintaining a hefty 15 percent annual operating profit. As recently as 1977 Great Lakes had only $50 million in operating revenue. Years of lead profits have funded major diversification efforts for Ethyl and its owners, led by the Gottwald family of Richmond. The company's annual report for 1996 revealed "a long-running strategy: namely, using Ethyl's significant cash flow from lead antiknocks to build a self-supporting major business and earnings stream in the petroleum additives industry." By 1983 Ethyl had become "the world's largest producer of organo-metallic chemicals." It would expand its production for the petroleum industry (including the purchase of the petroleum additives divisions of Amoco and Texaco), as well as acquire interests in other specialty chemicals, plastics and aluminum products, oil, gas and coal. Ethyl would also invest billions in pharmaceuticals, biotech research, semiconductors and life insurance. At great expense, it would develop a serene corporate campus of seventy acres along the banks of the James River in Richmond. * * * As the science against TEL mounted and government regulation stiffened, Ethyl began a series of restructurings that today find its TEL business standing suspiciously alone. In 1989 Ethyl spun off Tredegar Industries, a group it created to hold its aluminum, plastics and energy businesses. For every Ethyl share they held, investors would receive prorated shares in the new company. Voil�! Limited liability. Later Ethyl would spin off its billion-dollar insurance company, First Colony Life. In 1994 Ethyl would split up its chemical and petroleum additives division and create a wholly owned subsidiary, Albemarle Corporation, named after the 100-year-old paper company that bought Ethyl (which retained its name) in 1962. One of the main enterprises of Albemarle, ironically, is supplying Ethyl with MMT under a long-term agreement. MMT is another gasoline additive (made of manganese and barely sold in the United States) with suspected health consequences. In 1994 Ethyl and its Albemarle offspring did a rousing $48 million of business together. Oddly, for a company that claims to be proud of its product (so proud that under an obscure provision of NAFTA it sued the Canadian government for outlawing MMT) Ethyl declined to tell Automobile Magazine in 1999 in which countries it sold MMT to refiners, presumably because it fears awakening consumers to the presence of its manganese additive. Because it was itself spun off to a management team from Great Lakes Chemical, Octel remains highly concentrated in lead, with TEL representing 85 percent of its business in 1996. Although CEO Dennis Kerrison has announced his intention to develop non-TEL businesses into core businesses by 2005, "even the most extreme estimates allow for the continued use of leaded petrol in some parts of the world until at least the year 2010." Off the record, company officials admit they could be selling lead in 2020 and beyond. Until then, Octel, "through the specialist facilities of Octel Environmental, provides a range of decontamination, destruction, removal and recycling services to refineries throughout the world to help to reduce the environmental impact of toxic lead residues." Under its Product Stewardship Programme--"a public service," Octel calls it--fifty tons of lead alkyl sludge were removed from New Zealand refineries as part of a cleanup beginning in 1996. Octel had supplied the refineries with 4,000 tons of TEL annually for years. So, in a crowning irony, poisoned motorists in New Zealand and around the world will, through higher gasoline prices, pay Octel (and Ethyl) to clean up the mess the TEL barons and their refinery customers made. Will the Sun Ever Set on Lead? Associated Octel's fiftieth-anniversary catalogue affectionately quotes a letter the company received from a former technical services manager in 1982, when Britain's antilead campaign kicked off in earnest: "Many funerals have been arranged for lead in petrol--1926, 1943, 1954, 1970, etc.--as I can recall. The grave has been dug, the service arranged, the coffin prepared, the parson and mourners instructed, but the body just would not lie down in the coffin." Though the catalogue was published in 1988, the sentimental hope that it's not over yet is secretly still held by Octel and Ethyl, and all the others who continue to push leaded gasoline. But the body of tetraethyl lead must be made to lie down in its coffin. The five-year phaseout of leaded gasoline favored by the World Bank in 1996 makes inarguable moral and business sense--two things that don't always go together, especially at the World Bank. The only ones arguing otherwise are Octel, Ethyl and the small coterie of self-interested researchers and narrowly trained toxicological technicians who've lived on the industry's tab for the last thirty years, since Robert Kehoe stepped down. Many European nations have banned leaded gas for 2000. Progress has been made. But somehow Ethyl and Octel will be splitting Third World profits for years to come. If the science was ever in doubt (and it really wasn't), the facts are now incontrovertible. Leaded gasoline is dangerous. When safer alternatives are available, as they always have been, leaded gasoline's benefits are nil. It is not good for cars, and it prevents the use of modern emissions reduction equipment, like catalytic converters, which, owing to the greenhouse effect, the world needs more desperately now than ever. TEL's most crass (and main) historic selling point is no longer valid: It isn't even cheap. There is at least one simple lesson to be drawn from the tetraethyl lead story. Industry cannot be trusted to regulate itself, as Clair Patterson--the man who dated the earth and single-handedly deflated ethylized science--once remarked. "It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to cooperate and collaborate with industries in investigating and deciding whether public health is endangered--it is a direct abrogation and violation of the duties and responsibilities of those public health organizations." As for General Motors, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Ethyl, Associated Octel and rest of the lead cabal, it's conceivable they'll be hauled into court sooner or later, which is one reason these companies all take such an active interest in so-called tort reform legislation. You would too, if you had been a key actor in one of the most tortious episodes of twentieth-century industrial history. We can hope that Congress doesn't give them a free pass, but no matter what, it will be the citizenry that will pay any financial bills coming due. They've already paid with their health. Many of the effects of childhood lead exposure are irreversible. These businesses should be shut down. And to make sure they don't forget their heinous experience, all these companies ought to open their archives to independent review, to assist in assembling the information that will help lay TEL down to eternal rest, to help show the world what went wrong when common sense was put on hold in the name of profit. In the face of all that is known today, the leaderships of foreign countries who continue to poison their people with TEL should be harangued to phase out lead from their gasoline--on a daily basis, by the United Nations as well as by governments, agencies and medical officials from around the world. Until then, the merchants of tetraethyl lead--or any other unnecessary additive known to be dangerous--are no better than criminals. They should be dealt with accordingly. Maybe in this new century they will be. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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