No new petrol or diesel cars by 2040

[ban-all-sheds]

You may well be right, but are you suggesting that violence and crime reduced, and intelligence increased in the generation of people born following removal of lead additives from petrol??

The former is undeniable.

But correlation does not prove a causal link.

 

[JohnD]

yes, it would be interesting to find some other factor with the same correlation, especially the earlier/later date of reduction in criminality matching the earlier/later withdrawal of lead; and the higher crime rates in children who grew up in districts with higher levels of lead pollution. Apart from the lead manufacturers, can you find any research that contradicts the studies?

I suppose you read the article about lead in childrens' brains making them more violent and less controlled, and the one about average children's IQ being lower with higher lead content.

 

[bernardgreen]

I don't believe that the brain damage caused by leaded petrol was understood when it was being phased out.

The damage that lead caused was known about more than 20 years before lead was banned from fuel.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5198753/

In 1977, the first report to clearly associate prenatal lead exposure from drinking water with severe mental retardation came from Glasgow when Sir Abraham Goldberg and his colleagues investigated a cluster of affected young children. Finding no clear cause, they detected prenatal lead exposure by analyzing dried blood spots collected at birth and determined that the source of lead was drinking water contaminated by storage in lead lined tanks.19 After achieving regulatory controls on the use of lead in house paints and gasoline, public health investigators are once more assessing the importance of lead in drinking water as a source of medically significant exposures.

 

[stillp]

the main challenge of EVs is to develop better/cheaper/lighter batteries

The main challenge for EVs is the absence of the infrastructure necessary for charging, whatever the battery performance.

 

[John D v2.0]

For storage they discovered many years ago that pumping watert up a hill in Wales was very efficient.
However i fell like even If every house had a water tower in the garden 10m high and 1m³ of water that wouldn't be much energy, so it would have to be centralised somewhere with good elevation change.

 

[EFLImpudence]

Don't worry.

When 2039 arrives and it's not ready they can pass another law.

"New diesel and petrol cars and vans will be banned in the UK from 2040"

Anyone see the flaw?

 

[John D v2.0]

Well the old ones will carry on, that's just a phasing out. Or are you suggesting the manufacturers will have a last minute pre registration drive and it'll be like the vacuum cleaner thing we had a couple of years ago

 

[EFLImpudence]

It doesn't matter with vacuum cleaners.

Either, lots of people will wait, from 2037?, to buy one in 2039 - or manufacturer's will stop production in 2030something for fear of not being able to sell them.
How will anyone know which?

Lots of things can happen in twenty-three years.
Hinkley C (or others?) delayed.
No more imported electricity because Europe needs it all.
Four general elections.

Aircraft, ships, lorries and buses?

 

[JohnW2]

yes.

I would need to look deeply into the available data before I got anywhere close to being convinced.

Attempting to draw conclusions regarding causal relationships from correlations is just about the most iffy and widely abused aspect of Statistics. Did you know, for example, that the amount of damage and the number of casualties increases if more fire engines are sent to a fire, or that the increase in keyboard skills was due to a reduction in church attendance (or maybe due to to the increased consumption of curries)?!

The problem is that any two things which show changes with time will be correlated. It is no real surprise that exposure to gasoline lead during 1941-1974 and the number of US violent crimes during 1964-1997 both showed progressive increases, even if there is absolutely no causal relationship at all - and, of course, it is no surprise that exposure to gasoline lead fell rapidly after it was banned! That just leaves the reduction in US violent crimes from about 1993 onwards, but there are countless possible explanations for that (indeed, almost certainly a combination of very many factors).

Kind Regards, John

 

[ban-all-sheds]

TBF I didn't properly read the Wikipedia article, but doesn't it say that there is also a correlation between the fall in crime and the availability of legal abortions?

 

[ban-all-sheds]

Attempting to draw conclusions regarding causal relationships from correlations is just about the most iffy and widely abused aspect of Statistics.

Bread.

Apparently almost every perpetrator of crimes in the USA had eaten bread in the preceding 24 hours.

 

[EFLImpudence]

Crumbs!

Nearly everyone has a higher than average number of limbs.

 

[JohnW2]

Nearly everyone has a higher than average number of limbs.

Indeed so (if, by 'average', you are referring to some sort of 'mean'), but that's different from attempting to determine causality from correlation.

Abuse of, and misunderstandings concerning, 'averages' (and, even worse, percentages and 'percentage changes') is a whole different discussion!

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnW2]

Apparently almost every perpetrator of crimes in the USA had eaten bread in the preceding 24 hours.

Indeed so, and the great majority of them are apparently non-virgins.

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnD]

The damage that lead caused was known about more than 20 years before lead was banned from fuel.

yes, but if you find someone who was around prior to leaded petrol being phased out, the conversation was all about catalytic converters and general air pollution.

The newspapers and TV programmes were not filled with articles about brain damage to millions of babies in cities or beside busy roads, caused by leaded petrol. The UK government even slowed down the pace until Austin Rover had newer engine designs.

If anyone can find any evidence suggesting that the number of crimes goes up and down according to the amount of bread consumed, I'd like to see it.

And if Bas is hard-of-reading, he can look at:

"Abortion and birth control access
The famous abortion-crime hypothesis forwarded by Freakonomics is suspect because of two reasons. The first is that it's not strictly causal i.e. cause precedes effect (crime rates were going up before Roe v. Wade) and the second is that it's not internationally expandable. For example, the Abortion Act of 1967 in the United Kingdom, all but legalizing abortion, occurred well before before Roe but the UK had a surge in crime after the United States' peak (though only by a couple years). Contrariwise, Canada experienced tighter restrictions in legalized abortions from 1969-1988 but had a crime wave similar in duration, peak, and decline of that of the United States.[17]

A more plausible hypothesis is that greater availability of birth control in general may have caused the decline in the crime rates, and as more people used birth control in the late 1960s and 1970s, fewer unwanted children were born into unfortunate circumstances. This has the advantage of cutting across all countries and being an international trend. However, there remains a very large flaw in that crime rates were considerably lower in the 1950s than they are in modern times; the surge between the 1960s and 1990s and subsequent decline remains unexplained, and if lack of family planning was truly the cause, then crime rates should have been even higher before the mass availability of birth control in the United States. This is not the case. "

After five years of people trying to pick holes in the leaded petrol hypothesis, can you find nothing more convincing?