Document BREQVe08pV7YJbJOGbw0v7a8o

Leaded Gasoline and Our Health'. Tetraethyl lead was introduced as an an cess to make lead-free gasoline will be ex tiknock additive in gasoline in 1923. Its pensive, and so it has been fought, most ef . purpose was to reduce refining costs by fectively in the Slate Senate Transporta making lower-octane gasoline more effi tion Committee. Public counter-pressure is cient. By last year 400 million pounds of needed. lead were being emitted annually from How pervasive is the lead threat? Scien auto engines in the United States. A lot of tists have found lead in arctic snows, that was--is--ingested by humans. Lead is where no vehicles have ever traveled. a cumulative poison. In sufficient amounts Oceanographers have measured it in in It kills. In lesser amounts it can cause creasing quantities far out at sea. It is in blood abnormalities, partial paralysis or our blood and our bones right now. and it . other maladies. Lead is not good for is building up. This toxic process will con people. tinue until our legislators decide once and Last week the Assembly passed a bill for all to ban lead from gasoline. that would phase out almost entirely ail leaded gasoline in California by 1977. The single exception would be a premium grade that could have a half-gram of lead per gallon. (Regular grade gasoline in Cali* fomia now has 2Vi grams of lead per gal* ' Ion.) Similar legislation passed the Assem- bly last year; but was quickly killed by the State Senate Transportation Committee, over which the oil industry has considera* f hie influence. The bill's author, Assembly-h ) man Peter F. Schabarum (R-Covina)., is/ t not optimistic about the bill's fate in the? ' Senate this year, even though his measure \ \ is clearly in the public interest. The bill is aimed at the oil industry, not the automobile manufacturers. Virtually all American-made 1971 cars are engi neered to operate on lead-free gasoline, and. all will be in the coming years. Moreover, automakers say that older cars can be mo* ' dified cheaply and easily to run efficiently on lower-octane (i.e., leadless) fuels, sim ply by altering spark timing. Leadless gasoline is a necessity, say the manufacturers, for the proper functioning of the planned catalytic muffler, the most-1 promising device for controlling emissions . of oxides of nitrogen. These pollutants are ' a key element in producing photochemical smog. Leaded gasoline inhibits the chemi cal process within the catalytic muffler by which the oxides of nitrogen are removed. PNVC00008330 Many major gasoline makers now offer either a low-lead or leadless gasoline, but., complete conversion of the refining pro