Full of Lead

Intro to The Overhead Wire Daily

Has everyone seen the chart below? I was reminded of this chart which makes the rounds on social media every now and again when people argue which generation is the greatest or why certain generations seem like they make decisions other generations don't like, mostly piling on Baby Boomers but also Generation X. I'm a Xennial (1977-1983) so I try to stay out of that fray for the most part.

The chart has been changed to include Generation X as a label and was shared in a substack article but it is originally from a 2022 paper on early childhood lead exposure and lost intelligence.

From the 1960s to 1980s lead use peaked and was found in paints, water pipes, and spread around through the air when automobiles used gasoline and the authors found that an average of 6 points in IQ drop in Gen Xers.

Pipes and paint chips are bad, but that leaded gasoline was much much worse. We know auto emissions have really bad impacts including increased instances of asthma, respiratory disease, and potential connections to cognitive functioning, but this was on a whole other level of bad.

Now Pulitzer Prize winning author Caroline Fraser has connected pollution to the proliferation of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest. Fraser looked at the their childhood homes and proximity to smelting plants that gave off heavy metals like arsenic and lead and notes that perhaps there's more of a connection than people might have thought. A particular plant in Tacoma was the source of heavy metals for 1,000 square miles.

She cautions that lead wasn't the only factor, but many killers grew up near smelting plants and all together came off less like what Hollywood made them into and more like something that was predictable.

This is why it's so frustrating to me when we step back on environmental regulations like mercury at power plants because they are too "burdensome" or "costly". That's an economic cost, but not the whole long tail of cost to the environment and the people that live in it.

And we can make decisions today that reduce these harms if we want to. We can move to electric vehicles and electrify the grid. We can get people walking and biking and clean up our transportation and building emissions.

I've always said my lungs don't care about your visual aesthetic when talking about overhead wires for trains and buses. I believe that now more than ever.

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