The leaded gasoline industry in the United States didn’t simply roll over and concede that “Lead must go.” On the contrary, in the early 1970s, the industry association embarked on a full-scale campaign to discredit critics, block legislation, and delay environmental regulations—it put ads in newspapers, lobbied politicians and bureaucrats, sued the Environ-mental Protection Agency, and worked hard to keep all of the corporate players on board. Nevertheless, as domestic sales of automobiles with catalytic converters (which worked only with unleaded gasoline) rose, support to phase down leaded gasoline grew, even among U.S. automakers and major oil companies.
Cornered, the U.S. leaded gasoline industry fought to survive, pursuing multiple strategies to maintain markets and profits. But to no avail. Despite its best efforts to stall, if not avert, a phasedown, by the mid-1980s the industry was effectively out of business, at least within the United States. The result was a much lighter ecological shadow of lead over the United States—and a much healthier environment for Americans—with average blood-lead levels dropping sharply by the late 1980s.
Why did this occur? The answer reveals further lessons about how and why ecological shadows of consumption change. It shows how important the strengthening of environmentalism since the 1960s was for changing regulatory frameworks and consumer choices. And it shows how introducing new environmental technologies—in this case, the catalytic converter—can alter trade and markets in ways that weaken an industry’s capacity to maintain political and corporate allies in the face of environmental criticism. At first glance, this might seem to suggest that environmentalism, technological ingenuity, and scientific knowledge enjoyed unqualified success in overcoming corporate resistance. Indeed, governments deciding to follow in the footsteps of the United States were often able to impose phasedowns more quickly.
Yet the phasedown of leaded gasoline in the United States, along with phasedowns in other (mostly wealthy) countries, would end up intensifying the ecological shadows of leaded gasoline in many of the world’s poorest regions and most unstable ecosystems. The chapter begins with an analysis of corporate efforts in the first half of the 1970s to delay any phasedown in the United States—essential for understanding the eventual results, and compromises, of the following decade.
By 1970, little headway had been made to reduce the consumption of leaded gasoline in the United States: 98 percent of gasoline still contained lead, and automotive exhaust accounted for around 80 percent of air-borne lead.1
The 1970 Clean Air Act directed the Environmental Protection Agency to set standards for safe levels of exposure to pollutants. Although, at the time, the agency didn’t have much experience with lead, the first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, seemed ready to tackle the task quickly, stating in 1971 that tetraethyl lead was “a threat to public health.”2 Predictably, scientists with links to the lead industry disagreed vehemently and, in an about-face, were now arguing that extrapolating from tests on animals to humans was of questionable value. The Ethyl Corporation was also claiming that the levels of lead from ethyl gasoline were inconsequential compared with those from lead-based paint. Some within the EPA became unsure about the need to regulate leaded gasoline, and a few within the agency were even arguing against doing so.
The agency decided to contract the National Academy of Sciences to survey airborne lead and provide advice. The resulting 1972 report was vague and cautious, hardly surprising given that the team of consultants included scientists like Robert Kehoe, but not like Clair Patterson. The team found no conclusive data to indicate levels of atmospheric lead below 2 micrograms per cubic meter raised average blood lead levels. Nor did it find any evidence that low levels of lead were toxic. A senior review committee for the National Academy of Sciences was not impressed. The consultants “failed miserably,” the chair of a review team lamented, “to form any sort of precise conclusion.”3 But their report did provide an excuse for delaying a phasedown to allow more time for research, an outcome that pleased Ethyl executives and investors (the corporation’s stock jumped 20 percent a day after the report was released).
Over the next year, the EPA became increasingly concerned with the health consequences of chronic exposure to the 180,000 metric tons of lead spewing from vehicle exhaust every year. The November 1973 agency report, EPA’s Position on the Health Implications of Airborne Lead, was firm in its conclusion: lead from automobile exhaust was an immediate threat to public health.4 The EPA knew the decision by auto-makers like GM to introduce catalytic converters would soon begin to chip away at demand for leaded gasoline. But it was worried automakers would find a way to modify catalytic converters to function with leaded gasoline. A month after the November report, the EPA announced a gradual phasedown, starting 1 January 1975, to reduce the average amount of lead in a refinery’s total gasoline output: from an average of 2.2 grams per gallon to 1.7 grams in 1975, then down to 0.5 grams per gallon by 1979.
These EPA targets were not met. DuPont and the Ethyl Corporation quickly sued. With a touch of Orwellian irony, Ethyl called its legal team the “Ethyl Air Conservation Group.” The firms won the first round in late 1974. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia set aside the EPA’s standards, calling them “arbitrary and capricious” and agreeing with Ethyl’s argument that the EPA must demonstrate “actual harm” rather than just “significant risk.”5
Legal wrangling was not the only reason for delays in regulating a phasedown of leaded gasoline. Political struggles were occurring both within the EPA and between the EPA and other government agencies. The public affairs branches of the lead additive industries were busy as well, portraying the efforts to remove lead from gasoline as a dangerous waste in a time of growing oil shortages and price hikes. A full-page newspaper ad running from late 1973 to early 1974 was typical. It showed oil pouring down a manhole from a drum draped in an American flag. The caption was designed to unnerve: removing lead from gasoline would waste one million barrels of American oil every day.6
Still, the EPA was putting in place policies that would bring about a significant phasedown of leaded gasoline. The agency made catalytic converters and special, narrower fuel inlets mandatory beginning with 1975 models. It required large retailers of unleaded gasoline to design nozzles to fit the narrower fuel inlets (which the standard, wider fuel nozzles for leaded gasoline did not fit). Refiners failed to convince the courts to overturn these measures and, beginning in 1975, unleaded gasoline pumps began to appear across the United States to serve cars with catalytic converters.
The EPA won a significant victory in1976 when the full U.S.Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned the 1974 decision and reinstated the lead standards, ruling in a 5-4 majority that the EPA could act on the basis of significant risk. The statute, the court advised, is “precautionary in nature and does not require proof of actual harm before regulation is appropriate.”7 The firms tried to fight on with an appeal, but the Supreme Court declined to hear it.
The U.S. Phasedown Accelerates
After these court decisions, the phasedown began to produce significant results. The amount of lead consumed in gasoline from 1976 to 1980 fell by half; the concentrations of airborne lead fell immediately. In Philadelphia, for example, the range was 1.3 to 1.6 micrograms per cubic meter in 1977. Just three years later, it was 0.3 to 0.4 micrograms per cubic meter—less than one-quarter as much. Over this time, similar declines occurred across all major cities in the United States, with average levels of lead in human blood falling 37 percent.8
The growth of self-service gas stations in the late 1970s presented a minor setback for efforts to rid U.S. roads of leaded gasoline. Some drivers of cars with catalytic converters—the EPA put the total at 10-15 percent—switched back to leaded gasoline. Some would take along a funnel when they refueled; others would make the fuel inlet large enough to fit a leaded gasoline nozzle. Most of these “fuel switchers,” it seems, were trying to save money: unleaded gasoline in the late 1970s and early 1980s cost 6-14 cents per gallon more than leaded gasoline. It was illegal for attendants and commercial fleet owners to refuel cars with catalytic converters with leaded gasoline, but not for the average driver. Owners faced a penalty for failing a vehicle emissions inspection, but many of the inspection programs were unable to detect a destroyed catalytic converter.
The compliance rate was nevertheless reasonable. Most drivers simply obeyed the label, “unleaded gasoline only.” Others seem to have been genuinely worried about the long-term health effects of using leaded gasoline for the general public, and especially for children, the subject of some 150 articles from 1970 to 1990, many in popular magazines like Newsweek and Time. Even by the early 1970s, pollsters were finding that between 60 and 70 percent of Americans worried about leaded gasoline exhaust “often” or “sometimes.”9
The U.S. Lead Industries Fight Back
Far from conceding defeat, the Lead Industries Association petitioned the EPA in 1980 to revoke the new standard for ambient lead levels. Its case seemed strong, at least on its face. The EPA had justified the standard with an Idaho Health Department study estimating that a 1 micro-gram per cubic meter increase in atmospheric lead raises blood-lead levels by 2 micrograms per deciliter (2 millionths of a gram per 100 milliliters). One of the coauthors, Anthony Yankel, was now saying he had miscalculated and overestimated the impact of atmospheric lead. The judge ruled against the Lead Industries Association, finding the original study to be sound; moreover, on learning that Yankel had gone to work for the lead industries after leaving the Idaho Health Department, he urged the Department of Justice to investigate Yankel’s conduct.10
The election of Ronald Reagan as president gave the lead industries new allies. In 1981, the Reagan administration slashed the EPA’s budget, personnel, and powers to enforce regulations. At first, it seemed the EPA would rescind its lead standards. But, with mounting scientific evidence of the toxic health effects of low levels of lead on children, and after a public backlash and much politicking between various agencies and interests, the Reagan administration realized that the political consensus was now strongly in favor of eliminating leaded gasoline and backed off.
The result in 1982 was a tightening of the phasedown rules for small refineries. The EPA also recalculated limits for lead content. It was now an average of the amount of lead in leaded gasoline alone, rather than the amount of lead in the entire gasoline pool. This was significant because unleaded gasoline was taking up an increasingly large portion of total gasoline sales. The new rules required refineries to maintain a quarterly average of 1.1 grams or less of lead per gallon of leaded gasoline (with some exceptions for very small refineries). This was not much different than the 1980 standard of 0.5 grams per gallon of total gasoline. But it was nevertheless a critical first step on the path to much bigger decreases in the near future.11
The public rhetoric of corporate executives over the next few years echoed that of the 1920s. The comments by Ethyl’s Lawrence Blanchard in the early 1980s are typical. “It was misleading at best and fraudulent at worst to talk about symptoms and horrors of lead poisoning,” he said at an EPA hearing. “That is just like talking about the horrors of gassing World War I soldiers with chlorine at a hearing as to whether we should chlorinate to purify drinking water.”12 By this time, however, such comments were winning over few supporters. Indeed, by 1984, the representatives and scientists working for the lead industries realized the battle to block the U.S. phasedown was all but lost. “Unfortunately, the atmosphere we’re now in prohibits objective scientists from coming forward,” lamented Ethyl’s director of air conservation in a 1984 New York Times article. “And why should they, when they would be crucified by the press, the EPA and the environmentalists?” By then, some refiners were supporting stricter standards—such as Ashland Oil during the 1984 Senate hearings—in part because these firms had put in place the facilities to manufacture unleaded gasoline.13
In their ongoing efforts to delay the phasedown for as long as possible, the lead industries continued to harass leading researchers, such as psychiatrist Herbert Needleman, who had caused a commotion in the 1970s with studies correlating levels of lead among children with lower performance in school. A scientist with links to industry accused Needleman in 1982 of manipulating his data to show that lead was toxic, a charge the EPA science advisory council would later dismiss as baseless.14 Charges such as “scientific misconduct,” even when totally false, were a valuable tactic the lead industry used to taint the popular press with uncertainty, cause publishing delays, rattle senior scientists, and intimidate postdoctoral fellows and tenure-tracking assistant professors.
Still, by the mid-1980s, these firms knew their cause was hopeless. The research pointing to the unhealthy effects of leaded gasoline that started with Patterson’s exploratory 1965 article was now an avalanche of hard-hitting data.
In 1985, 40 percent of the gasoline sold in the United States was still leaded. That year, riding a wave of research showing the harmful effects of airborne lead, the EPA lowered the refinery pool standard to 0.5 gram of lead per gallon of leaded gasoline. The next year, the EPA dropped it to 0.1 gram. The “phasedown” was fast becoming a “phaseout.”
In addition to setting tougher standards, the EPA employed a mix of policies to encourage refiners to cooperate and comply. The regulations from 1982 until 1987, for example, allowed refineries to trade lead permits through a system of averaging across the various refineries. The rules from 1985 to 1987 further permitted the banking of lead credits. This gave the refinery industry as a whole more flexibility. In particular, it helped smaller refineries manage some of the compliance costs of removing lead and installing processing equipment to add lost octane. The trading and banking programs ended in 1988, when the EPA imposed a standard of 0.1 gram of lead per gallon of gasoline for individual refineries.15
The results of the U.S. phasedown from the mid-1970s to the late-1980s are impressive. The lead content of gasoline decreased by 99.8 percent from 1976 to 1990, and average blood-lead levels fell sharply as a result. The Department of Health and Human Services, surveying 60 cities across the United States, found a 78 percent drop in human blood-lead levels from 1978 to 1991. Today the U.S. medical threshold for “safe” blood-lead levels is below 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood (10 millionths of a gram per 100 milliliters).16 Nearly 78 percent of children between 1 and 5 years old still had lead levels above 10 micro-grams per deciliter of blood for the period 1976-80, whereas only 4.4 percent had such levels by the period 1991-94. The regulations to remove lead from gasoline, Needleman estimates, “spared as many as 3.4 million children from growing up with hazardous concentrations of the toxic metal in their bodies.”17
The United States has only allowed small amounts of leaded gasoline since the late 1980s. The total amount of lead in gasoline was a little over 180,000 metric tons in the mid-1970s; by 1990, the total was around 450 metric tons—a decrease of 99.75 percent. Leaded gasoline accounted for a mere 0.6 percent of total gasoline sales when the EPA put in place a full ban for all highway vehicles in 1995; today only farm vehicles, marine engines, and racing cars are allowed to use leaded fuel.
A few countries, such as Japan, phased out leaded gasoline before the United States.18 But most did not. Understanding when, how, and why other countries, especially those in the developing world, began to consume—and then phase out—leaded gasoline reveals the complex political and economic forces shaping the global consumption of gasoline.
Leaded gasoline first began to spread beyond the United States in the 1930s. The Ethyl Gasoline Corporation set up Ethyl Export in the United Kingdom in 1930 to sell leaded gasoline overseas. This company became the Associated Ethyl Company in 1938, before changing its name to the Associated Octel Company in 1961. It first began to produce leaded gasoline in 1954. Four years later, the Lead Industries Association and the former American Zinc Institute formed the International Lead Zinc Research Organization to promote the global spread of leaded gasoline.
Firms like Ethyl reacted to the phasedown of leaded gasoline in the United States by expanding markets overseas. With sales falling in the United States, Ethyl tried to reassure shareholders by trumpeting its profits from a tenfold expansion of overseas business between 1964 and 1981 as a way to finance diversification. By the second half of 1979, Ethyl had announced that, for the first time, foreign sales of “antiknock compounds” surpassed U.S. sales.19
The spread of leaded gasoline overseas was uneven, with different countries having different degrees of exposure at different points in time. One of the countries with highest exposure was Mexico in the early 1970s, when the average amount of lead in the gasoline pool (both leaded and unleaded) was about 4.0 grams per gallon. Others were Egypt in the mid-1980s, with 3.1 grams of lead per gallon of gasoline, and Sri Lanka in the early 1990s, with 3.2 grams per gallon.20
Governmental success in phasing out leaded gasoline was uneven as well. A few did so in a matter of months. Others took much longer. Still others are yet to begin. Globally, the amount of lead added to gasoline declined by 75 percent between 1970 and 1993.21 The U.S. phaseout accounted for much of this decline. But other countries, such as Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Poland, and South Korea, were all part of this global phasedown as well. Wealthy states tended to remove lead from gasoline before poorer ones. By the mid-1990s, Japan, Canada, and the United States had phased out leaded gasoline. Germany was close behind, with only 2 percent of its gasoline still containing lead. On the other hand, 90 percent of the gasoline in the Philippines and 99 percent in Indonesia still contained lead at this time.
Many factors besides national income can influence phaseouts, in particular, factors related to the politics and economics of the auto and refinery industries. A few developing countries, such as Brazil and Thailand, were no longer consuming leaded gasoline by the mid-1990s.22 At the same time, a few advanced economies still allowed significant amounts of leaded gasoline. In Britain, for example, 32 percent of the gasoline sold contained lead. The figure was 55 percent in Australia, higher than either China (40 percent) or Mexico (44 percent). By the end of the 1990s, however, the pattern in the global consumption of leaded gasoline was unambiguous: 80 percent of the countries continuing to use leaded gasoline were poor.23
A glance at Europe shows the complexity of the global pattern of phasing out leaded gasoline. Although Germany began to phase out leaded gasoline in 1972, the majority of western European states didn’t begin doing so until the mid-1980s, and the European Union didn’t ban leaded gasoline until 2000. One reason it took Europe so much longer than the United States was the strong opposition of European automakers and many European states to making catalytic converters mandatory. In part, this was a reaction to the United States having done so in 1975: many Europeans worried a similar policy for the EU would give a competitive advantage to U.S. firms exporting automobiles to Europe. Still, the number of cars with catalytic converters grew steadily in Europe after the mid-1970s, with the result that once the phaseout of leaded gasoline did at last begin, it proceeded faster in many European states than it had in the United States.24
Unlike the United States, many states in western Europe used differential taxes to lower pump prices for unleaded gasoline, thus creating fewer incentives for drivers with catalytic converters to use funnels to fill up with leaded gasoline. This policy, explains economists Henrik Hammar and Åsa Löfgren, “did not assume people would make enlightened, ‘green’ choices.”25
Many governments of states outside of Europe were also able to phase out leaded gasoline faster than the United States, often by taking what environmental economist Hank Hilton calls a “giant step”—imposing one very large reduction in a two-year period during the phaseout process. As in Europe, many seemed to learn how to accelerate the process by studying the histories of earlier phaseouts. Many were convinced of the urgent need to act by the research showing the damaging health effects of exposure to low levels of lead. Moreover, the close correlations between falling amounts of leaded gasoline and falling blood-lead levels in countries like the United States made it clear that a phaseout could produce immediate results. Many governments came to see that the economic benefits of phasing out lead outweighed the costs, which continued to fall after the mid-1980s, as the global markets for unleaded gasoline grew. Shifts in economic conditions and technological possibilities also created more opportunities for governments to collaborate with oil companies and automakers in their phaseouts.26
By the mid-1990s, the main producer of tetraethyl lead, Octel Associates, was drawing on its profits from selling tetraethyl lead to spend up to $200 million a year to diversify,27 even as it did its best to delay for as long as possible a worldwide phaseout of leaded gasoline. Deploying tactics very much like the ones by Ethyl Corporation decades earlier, it challenged the scientific findings that lead was toxic. In New Zealand, for example, it ran ads claiming lead was “naturally occurring”—like salt, alcohol, and sugar. It funded new studies that “failed” to find a correlation between declining levels of leaded gasoline and declining blood-lead levels. And it added in a new twist. Refiners should not move too fast to eliminate lead, Octel argued, because the benzene they were using instead to boost the octane of unleaded gas was a known carcinogen. “We’re trying,” explained a member of Octel’s management board without a hint of irony, “to bring reason to the debate.”28
But, as in the United States in the 1980s, by the late 1990s, it became clear Octel was waging a hopeless campaign. Today less than 10 percent of gasoline worldwide contains lead—down from 40 percent in 1991. Most of the remaining countries with leaded gasoline have developing economies, and even they are changing over to unleaded gasoline. As latecomers, they can take advantage of greater opportunities to phase out leaded gasoline even faster than before, as the case of sub-Saharan Africa will make plain in chapter 9.