There is this form of air pollution,
which you probably have not heard of, called ultrafine particulates (UFPs). Though they are invisible, they seem to have some particularly nasty effects on human health. UFPs have not been well-studied, they are unregulated, and yet they are prevalent in commercial jet engine emissions.
But this is not an article about UFPs. There are plenty of articles you can read for that background (just search for UFPs here.) Instead, it’s an article about what aviation communities need to do about them. But to get there, you’ll have to slog through 1,000 words about a chemist you’ve never heard of named Clair Patterson. A guy who did as much to further the cause of environmental justice as any human being who ever lived.
I don’t blame you for finding that last statement over the top. Surely you would have at least heard of someone so important. Or at least his name would be found on a list of people considered for the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, Clair Patterson received no such recognition. But in a fairer world, he would have been on the short-list for four.
Four prize-worthy achievements
In his youth, Patterson was assigned to the Manhattan Project. His job was to help figure out a way to tease out the very rare Uranium 235 (bomb material) from naturally occurring (and totally boring) Uranium 238. In so doing he developed a reputation for three things:
- An obsessive attention to detail.
- Expertise with another totally boring element, Lead (Pb)
- A ninja-level mastery of a newly invented machine called a 6mass spectrometer.
Nobel Prize #1
For his PhD., Patterson helped developed the first accurate approach to dating very old objects. You’ve heard of Carbon Dating? Well, originally it was ‘Lead-Dating’. Same principle.
Nobel Prize #2
Once he got his own lab, his obsession with cleanliness became a system which is now referred to as a “clean room protocol.”
Every time Clair turned on his mass spectrometer to measure for lead he always got something; even in what were supposedly ‘clean’ laboratories. So, being Clair, he started acid washing every inch of his lab. Putting plastic on everything. He installed a new plumbing system. Then created a system for filtering the air. For a while he made people strip to their underwear to enter the lab. (He later decided it was good enough to have people undergo a special washing routine and don special clothing.) He found some dandruff on a machine and nearly lost his mind. 😀 In today’s world, he’d probably have been fired.
But finally, and this took six years, his machine read “no lead”.
To understand why he was so obsessed with cleanliness, think about the constant hum from your old refrigerator. You get so used to it that you’d would swear under oath that you don’t hear anything–until it stops, of course.
We had no idea how much small quantities of schmutz were affecting any number of tests and manufacturing processes until Clair Patterson came along.
The reaction many people had to Patterson’s approach must have been like how doctors felt 150 years ago when they were first told about ‘germs’.
But the clean room protocols he pioneered became accepted and are still in use around the world for everything from semi-conductor manufacture to the Hubble Telescope. His level of cleanliness went from a joke to standard practice.
Nobel Prize #3
And when he realised how hard it was to get the lead out of his lab, he embarked on a decades long effort to convince people that that there is environmental lead everywhere on planet earth. He realised that environmental lead must be so pervasive that we can’t even measure it properly. Again, it was the background hum that you never notice but is always there.
But by his initial estimates, human beings had elevated blood levels of lead 2100 times greater than normal.
And remember how he had been involved in determining the age of things via the decay of lead isotopes? Another part of his thesis was that the almost all environmental lead must have occurred within the last century. It must have come from man-made industrial processes, most likely Tetra-Ethyl Lead (TEL). (TEL was an essential additive to automotive gasoline.) This notion was so mind-blowing he had trouble getting people to believe it. How could human beings have possibly deposited so much lead that it created a background ‘hum’ on every measuring device in the world? It was ridiculous to think that human beings could influence the entire planet to such a degree in such a short time frame.
So, just as with the Clean Room, he began a series of experiments (many of them self-funded) that take obsession to new heights. And depths.
Patterson learned how to climb mountains–to find out at what altitude environmental lead stops occurring (spoiler alert: 10,000 ft.) He went down in submarines–to find out at what ocean depth dissolved lead is no longer present. He went into jungles. He went into deserts. He went to the Arctic. He went to the Antarctic. He went into the bodies of ancient mummies. (Totally lead free.)
He went everywhere to demonstrate the fact that environmental lead was, indeed, everywhere. It was a background hum on every spectrometer that no one ever noticed.
Where is Nobel Prize #4? Somewhere in there he found the time to squeeze in a paper establishing the age of planet earth using his previous work on the radioactive decay of lead. (About 4-1/2 billion years, plus or minus the odd bit of lava.)
Industry Opposition
But it wasn’t just his colleagues who gave him a hard time. There was a whole other group of people who refused to acknowledge his work, for completely different reasons.
The real reason there was so much damned lead everywhere, was that it was just so damned useful.
Environmental lead had proliferated so quickly because the auto industry had grown so quickly. And during that time, the auto industry had become totally dependent on gasoline with Tetra-Ethyl Lead (TEL). They insisted that making cars run without TEL was impossible. (And in fact, makers of piston-engine airplanes still say so.)
The various industries knew about the danger to human health from lead of course. As with tobacco and many other dangerous things that are highly profitable, they stone-walled research. But unlike tobacco, 1no one could deny the harmful effects of lead. So instead, they insisted it wasn’t there. Or that the levels were so small as not to matter. In fact, for decades, the world’s foremost expert on environmental lead was an employee of General Motors. (How did he get to be the world’s foremost expert? Well, his mentor invented Tetra-Ethyl Lead, silly.)
So whenever a congressman would suggest doing something about lead, the industry would say there were other far more pressing issues. Or that it wasn’t that bad. Or that the research was inconclusive. Or that more studies were necessary. And pretty darned expensive. Maybe in five years. Or better yet, ten. These things take time.
Sound familiar?
I’m a terrible story teller.
Crap! I just realised something. I didn’t explain the best part. Too late. (I know, I’ll fix it by putting this next bit in a different colour!) 😀
You may be wondering, what is a ‘safe’ amount of environmental lead. Here’s the punchline: There is none. There is no lead in the human body that does not cause some form of health problems; everything from cognitive effects (which present as ‘learning disabilities’) all the way to falling over dead.
That is why it was so important to have absolutely precise measurements of lead in the environment. So long as the numbers were in any way squishy, you couldn’t be sure if lead was the cause for any number of health problems.
But once you have solid numbers, then you can do the epidemiology. Then you can look at illnesses in a given area and you can say, “Lead, with this level of exposure, causes that set of maladies in the following rates.”
And no matter how low the levels of environmental lead, you get the same diseases and illnesses. It is only when you get to zero that those maladies cease to be present in populations. There is no safe level of lead.
Without Clair Patterson, we’d probably still be arguing over whether or not (or to what extent) lead harms us.
Sound familiar?
Outcomes
Fortunately for humanity, Patterson figured out a way to obtain results with next to no funding. And his work was so frickin’ air-tight it simply could not be refuted. By (literally) leaving no stone unturned, his arguments eventually won the day.
Some of the outcomes which can be directly related to his forty years of work on environmental lead include:
- The Clean Air Act
- The Clean Water Act
- The National Environmental Protection Act
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- The end of leaded gasoline (which the auto industry swore was technically impossible, by the way.)
And in fact, when the original legislation establishing NEPA and the EPA were proposed, they were commonly referred to as “Get the lead out” bills. Even though the last bit of leaded automotive gasoline was sold in 1996, a year after Patterson’s death.
If your child was born after 1990, she is likely 5-10 IQ points smarter thanks to Clair Patterson. The moment we stopped selling leaded gasoline, people (literally) began getting smarter.
Even so, leaded AvGas is still sold today as ‘essential’ for piston engine airplanes.
These things take time.
Thank You Jesus for giving us Clair Patterson
I’ve uttered exactly that prayer. Because I cannot imagine how we get to where we are today on lead without Clair Patterson. No normal researcher would have been anywhere near as relentless. Frankly, most of us cannot afford to be that pushy. It required a person of great talent, but also someone obsessed to the point where people openly wondered about his state of mind, to break through the resistance he faced on all sides.
But that is also why he did not receive many of the accolades he deserved.
Lead vs. Ultrafines
Finally, we’re at the “What does any of this have to do with ultrafine particulates and Sea-Tac Airport?” part.
We’ve written many times about the early EPA, which then, as now, spends much of its time studying and regulating auto pollution. The auto companies were forced to do things they said were ‘impossible’.
But it wasn’t just the Big 3. Back in the ’70’s the airport communities were also able to achieve landmark agreements like the Sea-Tac Communities Plan. And that was because the EPA, as you’d expect, originally had authority over all pollution.
However by the 1980’s the airlines learned from the auto companies’ experiences. They saw how the Big 3 got pushed around and were determined to avoid the same fate. So they lobbied Congress to shift regulatory authority away from the EPA and over to their friends at the FAA. And that meant:
- No mandatory environmental regs for aircraft (noise or emissions.)
- No community law suits.
- And lead is still in every gallon of 5AvGas.
…to name but a few.
The fact is that all our legislators voted for those things. For the good of Boeing. For the good of hard working people everywhere. For the good of the nation.
But for some reason they ignored the fact that the auto industry always found ways to meet every EPA reg. Even the ‘impossible’ ones. They all made a deal with the devil for short term gains of “jobs and growth” over long term concerns over human health, the community interest and the environment.
Now what?
And our first step is to stop denying that denial is a big part of our problem. When it comes to ultrafine particulates, our legislators behave no differently than legislators in Detroit did when it came to leaded gasoline back in the day.
Instead of doing something Sea-Tac Airport doesn’t like now they talk about a second airport. In 25 years. They talk about electric airplanes. In 25 years.
Frankly, it’s become hard to tell who our real friends are when most of their rhetoric is about ‘the future’ and so little actual funding is happening now.
Currently, research on aviation emissions proceeds at a snail’s pace. A regulatory standard UFP monitor goes for about $165,000. We’ll feel blessed this year to get the first Puget Sound Clean Air Agency (PSCAA) monitoring station near Sea-Tac Airport. Ever. And currently? PSCAA has no budget for measuring UFPs; only the same roadway emissions the EPA monitors along highways. And woodsmoke. We love measuring woodsmoke.
One possibility we must accept is that our legislators, 4all of them, have accepted a status quo that will never get us where we need to go.
How to win without Clair?
We have no 3Clair Patterson to work the problem relentlessly, whether people like him or not. And currently, there is no low dollar way to get the data we need–even with an off-the-rails genius. And worst of all? The airlines figured out how to subvert most of the good works of environmental legislation of the ’70’s.
But the good news is that we don’t need Clair Patterson. We just need to get serious and tell our legislators to start doing the hard things. Adequately funding the research we need. Now. Because, at the end of the day, it will be hard evidence that will drive the legislation and the compensation we deserve.
No data. No problem
The lesson of Clair Patterson is this: “No data. No problem”, an expression used by engineers everywhere. It simply means, “If we’re not required to measure it? We’re not gonna worry about it.”
But if you can get the rock solid data, then you have a chance.
So the industry, your legislators, even unions concerned about jobs; basically everyone, will be strongly incentivised to slow walk this for as long as possible, while telling everyone how hard they’re working the problem. They did it with lead, so why wouldn’t they do it with aviation emissions?
All they have to do is run out the clock waiting for “electric airplanes” and “second runways” that will never get here in our lifetime.
But if we believe that aviation emissions are for realz, we need to study them as seriously as we studied lead. We have to have urgency. Tick. Tock. The idea of getting one UFP monitor (maybe) is utterly ridiculous. We need to solve for the basic science now. Not one year at a time.
Deep Concern
Most politicians express deep concern and tell you how hard they’re working on it. But exactly how hard? Because if isn’t attached to millions in funding for aviation emission research, we would suggest that it’s not hard enough. Until your legislator is specifically pushing aviation related issues, as their highest ticket item? They are not doing enough.
Again, people tolerated environmental lead for an awfully long time, even though it was killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of people every year.
Will these proposals have an easy time in the State House? Of course not. They’ll die. At first. So what? It took many years to get lead research and regs approved. Keep trying. Be willing to lose. Show you’re willing to take it in the neck until we win.
If aviation emissions are not the hill your legislators are willing to die on? Now? Regardless of any of their other totally amazing work…
They’re not for real.
The real question…
Because the real question has never been for politicians. It’s for you.
Do you have the courage to tell everyone that they are not doing enough?
That’s what every winning activist does. No matter what other good things someone has done, they’re response is always “It’s not good enough.” And if you run into an ‘activist’ who tells you how ‘great’ a politician is doing on UFPs? Yeah, they’re probably shilling. Nobody is doing good enough. And everybody needs to do more.
Because, at the end of the day, it wasn’t Patterson’s talent that won the battle. It was the fact that nothing was ever good enough. He never backed down, and that was what finally carried the day.
Almost none of us will ever be that relentless. But none of us are doing enough.
(If we want to win, that is.)
*A nod to a perhaps apocryphal quote from Donald Trump (Where’s my Roy Cohn.) The former President bemoans the fact that Richard Nixon had a very effective and ruthless surrogate. More proof that a joke just gets funnier the longer it takes to explain. 😀
1The Latin word for lead is plumbum, from whence we get the term ‘plumbing’. But those ancient Romans had figured out that lead pipes affected the brain over 2,000 years ago. So why did people continue to use lead plumbing well into the twentieth century? It’s bendable and it doesn’t corrode. There’s an important lesson there: people will always vote for convenience over safety. And that is why one needs regulations.
2He later admitted that his calculations had been wrong. There was probably more like 600 times more lead in the average human body than 200 years ago. Nobody’s perfect.
3Patterson was so ethically scrupulous that he repeatedly refused offers of tenure from Cal-Tech. Near the end of his career he did accept tenure, but only after his fight over TEL had been won.
4We’ve written elsewhere many times with direct quotes from Governor Inslee, Rep. Rick Larsen, among others that they have no intention of doing anything that might be considered difficult for the commercial airlines industry or Sea-Tac Airport.
5Jet-A, which fuels commercial jets, is mostly kerosene and never required lead additives.
6People hate it when I do this, but a mass spectrometer is sort of like the original Star Trek Tricorder. You put in a sample and it can tell you what it’s made of.