Microgreens: the guy who f*ed the planet - and how we're still cleaning it up

Leaded petrol has made us measurably dumber.

Scientists suspect that leaded petrol has also made us more aggressive and of course it kills people as well. And the same guy who put lead in fuel also created a miracle refrigerant that tore a hole in the one thing that protected our planet from runaway radiation from the sun.

This is the first of our Microgreens episodes where I spend a short amount of time answering your questions, or talking about something that may not get a whole, full episode.

For the first episode I wanted to talk about the guy who really f*ed the planet twice.

Transcript

Kia ora, kaitiaki, and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West – an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place, without the judgement, and making it fun. And of course, we’ll be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So if you’re looking to navigate through everything green – or not so green – you’ve come to the right place.

Just a quick note before we get started: I get a wee bit sweary in this episode, so it may not be right for kids’ ears.

Leaded petrol has made us measurably dumber – roughly two IQ points each – although it’s higher for those who grew up in the 60s. Which doesn’t sound like much, but some of us actually don’t have enough to spare as it is. Those lost IQ points also cost the global economy between three to six trillion – so it’s no laughing matter. Scientists suspect that leaded petrol has also made us more aggressive – and of course, it killed people as well.

And the same guy who put lead in fuel also created a miracle refrigerant that tore a hole in the one thing protecting our planet from runaway radiation from the sun. One guy. Exceptional job.

Kia ora, I'm Brianne, and this is our very first MicroGreens episode – where I answer some of your questions, or just explore a super interesting topic that doesn’t get its own show. And I wanted to talk about the guy who fucked the planet over twice – because he’s fascinating.

Have you heard of Thomas Midgley?

Thomas Midgley Jr. was born in 1889 in Dayton, Ohio, into an inventor’s dream household. His father was a tyre engineer, and his mother taught maths – so dismantling stuff was what they did. After earning a mechanical engineering degree at Cornell, he then got a job at General Motors in the research division under the legendary Charles Kettering. Now, if you’ve listened to the episode this week about electric cars, you’ll remember the name – because he was the guy who invented the starter motor and kind of destroyed electric cars. Sounds small – major reason that everybody moved to internal combustion. Make of that what you will.

Thomas was skinny. He wore glasses. And he was relentlessly curious. And I don’t know why, but I’m picturing like a book Harry Potter in my mind. But he was also a dramatic showman – and he liked the stage. That’s important. He loved dramatic lab demonstrations that got people excited. He set things on fire. He liked to explode things. Typical chemist, I suppose.

And he was very quickly obsessed with two of the major engineering headaches of the day: the violent knocking noise that rattled petrol engines, and the toxic, flammable, killer gases that leaked out of domestic refrigerators.

It was that time – peak 1920s optimism. Everything was about horsepower and convenience. Health and safety? Not so much.

People in Newham said he was brilliant and charming and very cocky. Which is perfect, because he really cocked some stuff up.

Back in the 1920s, of course, cars were gaining traction – if you’ll pardon the pun – but of course they had some problems. And one of those was engine knock, which was a problem that not only made an irritating banging noise, but also caused damage to the engines. It was mistimed explosions of the fuel. Thomas was told he had to fix it, or internal combustion engines might never become the mainstream thing that they have.

This guy’s legacy really is.

As I said – he was a curious guy. So to fix it, he kind of splashed everything he could into petrol. Iodine, aniline, selenium – he even tried melted butter. Surprisingly, nothing calmed the racket – not even the butter.

Then in 1921, he added a dash of something called tetraethyl lead. It was like magic. The knock vanished, the engine purred, and there was no more damage done.

The car.

Of course, there was lots of damage done elsewhere.

Now, you probably know that lead isn’t something that you should be getting too close to. But even back then, we knew about that. The ancient Romans knew that lead was bad news – they used to make drinking vessels out of it and then warned one another not to use them.

Thomas wasn’t worried about it though – because who drank petrol?

In the perfect example of “fuck it, let’s make money and worry about it later” – of which there are many other examples – General Motors and Standard Oil rapidly formed a company called the Ethyl Corporation. And they called the additive Ethyl. Now, you may notice it’s missing a word.

Leaving “lead” off the label was one of the first examples of greenwashing – or marketing excellence. We would probably call it lying now. But in the early 1920s, when young women were still painting watch dials with radium – nobody really cared.

Unfortunately, the damage happened really rapidly. Just one week after firing up their brand new refinery in New Jersey, 32 workers who hand-drilled tetraethyl lead – without gloves, without masks – were hospitalised hallucinating insects crawling under their skin. They had seizures. They collapsed. They had tremors. They had horrific headaches. And eventually five of them actually died.

Newspapers called the refinery “the loony gas building”.

Thomas himself actually developed lead poisoning – which seems totally fair – but unlike the factory workers, he got to go and convalesce in a sanatorium and came back mostly fine.

In 1924, to try and calm everybody down, he poured neat tetraethyl lead across his hands and then took a deep breath in – shaking and grey and pale and just looking apparently not well – he said, “I could do this every day.” This was in a press conference. To loads of reporters.

He then added, “There is absolutely nothing harmful in Ethyl.”

Except, you know, lead.

The papers printed that quote verbatim. Standard Oil executives probably got drunk – or went and did some kind of animal sacrifice. I don’t know. Whatever it is that super evil people do. And construction began on an even bigger plant.

Now, a lot of people have heard of Thomas Midgley and they kind of think he’s this guy who was doing the best he could, and he didn’t really know what he was doing. He wasn’t trying to cause harm.

This is proof that that’s absolute bullshit. He knew his additive was dangerous. He knew it killed people. And he didn’t care at all. He was an arsehole.

Now lead is so hard on us because its ionic form is similar to calcium and zinc ions – and so the body mistakenly uses it in their place. It wedges itself in enzymes and signalling proteins that your nerves rely on – so it blocks the chemical messengers that your brain uses to grow, your nerves use to send impulses backwards and forwards – and just wreaks havoc in general.

That’s why so many of the symptoms of lead poisoning are, of course, neurological.

And despite all of this evidence that this additive was truly horrendous – and all of the prior knowledge that lead was just bad news – by the 1950s almost every single litre of petrol on earth carried lead.

Kids used to play in driveways that were dusted with it. Farmers spread lead-laced exhaust across fields. And blood lead levels climbed.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, epidemiologists have since pinned a global loss of IQ points to this very factor. And it’s particularly pronounced in those who grew up in the 1950s and 60s – because your childhood is, of course, when your brain is undergoing the most development.

High lead levels also line up with spikes in violent crime. But – as we know – correlation does not equal causation. But this is something a lot of criminologists take seriously.

Now, health officials did try and say, “Yeah, let’s not do this anymore.” The US Surgeon General convened a hearing way back in 1925. But Thomas stood up and said, “Ethyl is safe. Everything you know is wrong.”

Some cities even banned leaded fuel – but Standard Oil lawyers and our roaring car market just buried the issue. Which is just like the playbook for climate change.

Eventually, though, catalytic converters – which strip out carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides out of exhaust gases – they became mandatory to prevent air pollution. And as a result, leaded fuel had to go, because the lead strips the metals out of the catalytic converter.

A UN campaign only just got the last countries out of leaded fuel in 2021. That’s how recent it is.

And now, a century after Thomas’s breakthrough, we’re still spending billions and billions of dollars scraping lead out of the ground.

So that’s fuck-up number one – a fix for the engines that totally rewired society.

But he wasn’t done. Oh no, no, no.

He was just getting warmed up – like our planet.

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So back in the 1920s, fridges killed people. Not by freezing them to death – but by leaking. Honestly, I’ve got to wonder how anybody made it out of the 1900s alive.

Most fridges used ammonia, methyl chloride, or sulphur dioxide as the refrigerant gas. All cheap. All super corrosive. Flammable. And liable to seep into your kitchens and gas you silently. Unfortunately, they’re colourless. Odourless. So you wouldn’t know it was happening. And there are plenty of stories of entire families being wiped out by gas leaks they didn’t know were happening.

But our hero Thomas was back. Bless him.

Working with Charles again, he scoured chemistry to try and figure out what would be a better alternative. And he found a compound that ticked three boxes: it was non-flammable, it was non-toxic, and it was easy to mass-produce.

And by 1930 – a very busy man, clearly – he settled on something called dichlorodifluoromethane, which is very hard to say. You may know it as Freon-12, or CFC-12, or just more broadly speaking: CFCs.

In his usual dramatic fashion, he revealed this new discovery at an American Chemical Society meeting. He took a deep breath of Freon and exhaled it over a lit candle – blowing the candle out. Proving that it was not only safe to breathe, but also non-flammable. And then he said, “Gentlemen, this is perfectly harmless.”

And I think that may have been his favourite sentence.

The room burst into applause. The problem was solved. He had saved lives.

Now, Freon is super stable. He was absolutely right. And that’s actually what makes it both safe and horrendous. It doesn’t react with anything to cause harm – so that means those super safe molecules drift upwards fully intact, taking decades to reach the atmosphere. And when they get there, ultraviolet light rips them apart – freeing the chlorine atoms.

And unfortunately, chlorine slices through the ozone molecules.

Quick chemistry explanation: oxygen in its gaseous form is two oxygen atoms bonded together into one molecule. Ozone is three. The UV radiation up in the atmosphere constantly breaks the O₂ down, so you’re left with two oxygen atoms – which bond to O₂ molecules to form O₃, creating ozone. This reaction is more or less balanced up there, so the level of ozone stays stable.

Now, less ozone means more UVB reaching the Earth. Obviously bad.

The only reason our planet is habitable at all is because the ozone layer prevents about 90% of that radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface.

In 1974, two scientists – Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland – started to talk about the really big problem that we were sprinting towards, after calculating that unchecked CFC use could chop global ozone down by a third.

And as per the usual playbook, industry lobbyists said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it isn’t. It’s fine.” And ignored them.

Until 1985 – until a British Antarctic study actually saw the hole in real life. It was half the size of the United States back then.

That quite literally put a hole in their argument.

So the lobbyists sat down and shut up. And eventually we signed the Montreal Protocol, which is, of course, the greatest example of humans ever coming together and cooperating on an incalculable issue.

As a result, atmospheric chlorine has peaked. The ozone hole is gradually patching itself back together. It’s not really a hole, per se – it’s a thinning of certain areas closer to the poles. So don’t imagine it as a great missing piece. And it’s on track to be completely patched by 2050.

So – good news all around.

But CFCs are also massively potent greenhouse gases – thousands of times stronger than carbon dioxide. So they’ve also heated the planet, probably about one-tenth of a degree, scientists have estimated.

So I guess you could say that’s almost the third way he’s fucked up the planet. His inventions really were the gift that just keeps giving.

Now, his supporters still argue that CFCs made refrigeration safe – which is absolutely true. They did do that. But there were other options. He could have used non-toxic hydrocarbons like propane – which was already available. Freon really only won because DuPont held the patents and the marketing muscle.

The same old story.

Then in 1940, Thomas contracted polio and he lost much of the use of his legs – which is, of course, very sad.

True to form, he engineered a way that he could sit himself up without help. He created a rope and pulley system – and I am imagining something out of Wallace and Gromit – so he could haul himself out of bed without getting help.

Four years later, that went wrong. He got tangled in his cords and he was found dead. The symbolism somewhat writes itself.

He died the way he lived – inside a flashy engineering fix that turned fatally wrong.

Perhaps that’s a bit dark. But it is hard to feel sorry for him when the harm he deliberately caused still has ramifications today – and will continue to for decades.

So there you go. I think the title is warranted – he may be one of the worst people for the planet ever.

I do like to point out that the Montreal Protocol is one of the best examples of human cooperation, and that we can work together to solve global issues – if we want to.

But sometimes I do wonder if we might be past that level of cooperation. For now, at least. Who knows?

So – I’ll see you next week for a full episode on mushrooms, because they’re way more important than you think they are.

And there you go. I hope you learned something – and realised that being green isn’t about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that’s your jam – fabulous. But sustainability, at its heart, is just using what you need.

If you enjoyed this episode, please don’t keep it to yourself – and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button.

Kia ora, and I’ll see you next week.