By Jamie Lincoln Kitman

There were many remarkable things about the story of how General Motors, DuPont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (today Exxon-Mobil) got together to add lead to gasoline, not the least being that no one had ever written about it in the popular press.

Until two years prior to my writing it up for The Nation, I'd never heard of it. A lawyer by training and manager of rock bands by day (Violent Femmes, They Might Be Giants), I moonlight as an automotive journalist, writing monthly columns for Automobile magazine and CAR, two of the more literate and widely read enthusiast publications in America and England, respectively. An American history major, an armchair environmentalist and a voracious reader of car magazines since childhood, I feel the lead gasoline story is one that really should have come to my attention earlier. When it finally did, I fell out of my armchair.

Now, my ideology places me in the lunatic fringe of car writerdom — that is, I've always been in favor of clean air and safety laws. And car magazines, which make their bucks largely on advertising revenue from car companies, don't as a rule have much time for clean air and auto safety. In general, if Detroit and Stuttgart don't or won't like it, car mags — which tend to be owned by equally heartless conglomerates — won't touch it. (In fairness, Automobile Magazine and CAR push their luck as far as any.) So it was that I wrote the world's first, as far as I am aware, anti-sport utility vehicle op-ed piece, not for a car magazine but for the New York Times in 1994. It did not improve my popularity with the auto makers, who make the lion's share of their profits building SUVs.

GM's distaste for me culminated in my being banned from its Saturn factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee, although this may have stemmed from the column where I proposed that the division's tagline— "A Different Kind of Car, A Different Kind of Company" — be replaced, my suggestion being the infinitely more accurate, "The Same Kind of Car, A Different Kind of Bullshit."

One of the nice things about my gig is the way it adds a touch of respectability and purpose to my main interest in life, other than my family and bands, which is old cars, specifically temperamental British ones from the 1960s — things like Lotuses, Austin-Healeys and MGs. Among normal people, I appear a pretty sad case, but in the company of car buffs I am a "car guy," someone who really likes cars. This is not, believe it or not, a universal condition among those who write about them.

As an "old car" car guy in the 1980s, I was alarmed by the then-prevalent suggestion that the removal of lead from gasoline would irreparably damage the engines of older cars as well as usher in an era of reduced horsepower and strangled performance. My concerns were selfish, though it may be noted that there was no public awareness at this time concerning the health effects of leaded gas, which were well-documented in the scientific literature but mostly unreported. As far as the citizenry knew, lead was being outlawed in gasoline to allow the use of emissions-reducing catalytic converters, which were contaminated by lead, preventing the car from running at all.

The funny thing was, the concerns voiced about unleaded fuel turned out not to be concerns at all — I ran old cars on unleaded more than 100,000 miles with no ill effects to report. Fast forward a dozen years and imagine my surprise when, on the eve of European Community moves to outlaw lead from gas (complete phase out in many western European countries began Jan. 1), I saw the same oil- and petroleum-additive companies making the same dire predictions in the English automotive press. Surely some mistake?

Around this same time, I read in the Journal of the Society of Automotive Historians, of which group I am a member, the research findings of an academic named William Kovarik, now a professor at Radford University in Virginia. He'd made fascinating discoveries on GM's early interest in ethanol as an octane booster, which is, of course, the purpose of adding lead to gasoline — to boost octane. (Octane is a number you see on the pump that describes the fuel's explosive properties.) Overlaying Kovarik's work with the history of lead and gasoline, particularly the seminal investigations conducted in the 1980s by public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, I connected the dots to arrive at a startling conclusion: In addition to being a known and profound public health threat, lead had been unnecessary from the start. There was an alternative: ethanol. And clearly, based on my experience with old cars, the destruction-of-engines angle — the main claim in the modern era in favor of leaded gas — was not even true. This got me going. Before I was done, I could state in The Nation with assurance:

"the severe health hazards of leaded gasoline were known to its makers and clearly identified by the United States, public health community more than 75 years ago, but were steadfastly denied by the makers, because they couldn't be immediately quantified;

• "for more than four decades, all scientific research regarding the health implications of leaded gasoline was underwritten and controlled by the original lead cabal — DuPont, GM and Standard Oil; such research invariably favored the industry's pro-lead views, but was from the outset fatally flawed; independent scientists who would finally debunk the earlier works' infirmities were — and continue to be — threatened, hounded and defamed by the lead interests and their hired hands;
• "other, safer anti-knock additives, including ethanol, which we use today, were known and available to oil companies and the makers of lead anti-knocks before the lead additive was discovered, but were covered up and denied, then fought, suppressed and unfairly maligned for decades;
• "the U.S. government was fully apprised of leaded gasoline's hazardous effects and aware of available alternatives, yet was complicit in their cover-up, and even actively assisted the profiteers in spreading the use of leaded gasoline to foreign countries;
• "the benefits of lead anti-knock additives — used to increase octane and counter engine "knock" — were wildly and knowingly overstated in the beginning and continue to be: Lead is not only bad for the planet and all its life forms, it is actually bad for cars and always was;
• "confronted in recent years with declining sales in their biggest Western markets, the current sellers of lead additives have successfully stepped up efforts to market their wares in the Third World, efforts that persist and have resulted in some countries today placing more lead in their gasoline, per gallon, than was typically used in the West, extra lead that serves no purpose other than profit;
• "faced with lead's demise and their inevitable days of reckoning, these firms have used the extraordinary financial returns that lead-additive sales afford to fund diversification into less risky, more conventional businesses, while taking a page from the tobacco companies' playbooks and simultaneously moving to reorganize their corporate structures to shield ownership and management from liability for blanketing the earth with a deadly heavy metal."

Now some of this is pure history and some of it is arguably overly technical for the popular media. But surely the fact that lead was never necessary, and that auto makers had an alternative — ethanol — is relevant. Surely the fact that 40-plus years of scientific backup supplied by industry turned out to be 100 percent wrong has some application to modern thinking and modern products, such as the gasoline additive currently in the news: MTBE (chosen by industry, less than coincidentally, over ethanol, despite MTBE's status as a suspected — now proven — carcinogen) and genetically modified foods, which have similarly moved into general use based on the scientific assurances of involved firms. Surely there is something to be discussed about the fact that some of the very same companies at the forefront of the genetically modified food movement — notably duPont and Dow — were big players in the lead gas story. Indeed, the introduction of pseudo-science by the lead gas interests and subsequent claims of scientific uncertainty when confronted with damning evidence independently gathered can be seen as an important first, providing a model that would be used by the asbestos, tobacco, pharmaceutical and nuclear power industries, not to mention on behalf of pesticides, infant formula, chemicals and other less than benign products, up through the present day.

One might additionally ask, Won't the news that leaded gasoline is still being peddled in Eastern Europe and the Third World, including nearby Central America, despite its known dangers, engage Americans? Isn't the fact that the lead makers are spinning off their non-lead businesses in preparation for getting sued big-time of interest to anyone?

So far, the answer is that only public radio thinks so. Appearances were quickly scheduled for me on NPR's "Living on Earth," PRI's "Connections," and WNYC,s "New York and Company." Next week, it's NPR's "All Things Considered" and PRI's "Marketplace." In the tele-visual realm, my "people" are in discussions with ABC, the BBC, Channel 4 and Granada in England, though time will tell. In the print world, there have been inquiries from France; CAR, the outspoken English automotive magazine I write for, has decided to run a condensed version. The daily newspapers and the rest of the print media, however, have yet to show up. In fact, no one in print journalism, save automotive columnist Lesley Hazleton, of the Detroit Free Press, who devoted her whole column to the piece, has found occasion to mention any of The Nation's findings.

Hazleton, whom I know and sent the piece to, is an exception as the car writer for a daily newspaper. She was hired to stir the pot; she's the successful author of several books, with numerous other interests, and probably wouldn't care if they fired her tomorrow. Most newspaper automotive sections, however, are filled with ads for new cars. The motoring column is merely a hat-rack to hang ads on, to make what amounts to a shopper insert seem like a real section of the paper. The advertisers don't appreciate controversy. The writers and editors of these sections (often one and the same) recognize this. These are the guys who knowingly go out on a career limb when they say the new Chevy Malibu looks boring. These aren't likely to be the people who'll explain in the Sunday paper how the entire world got itself poisoned with lead because GM, DuPont and Exxon lied to us.

Yet it is to the automobile editor that many newspapers have directed this story, when they could just as easily have sent it to the environmental, business, corporate crime, public policy, international or even gardening editors. (Seven million tons of lead from automobile exhaust were spewed on American roads between 1923 and 1986. But because lead never degrades, it's still in and on our water, our soil and our gardens.)

Initially, things looked bright at the dailies. I was gladdened to hear that the Washington Post's motoring columnist, Warren Brown, planned to cover the story's release with an exclusive preview. When his article didn't appear as scheduled, he reportedly told the magazine's publicists it had been pushed out of the paper by coverage of the Super Tuesday primaries. Warren's a good guy. Says he's going to put it up on the Post's Web site. Who knows what happened? Several New York Times reporters on non-automotive beats also expressed interest, but ultimately demurred, pointing to work overloads, upcoming vacations and, in one instance, the paper's disinclination to report other people's research, especially The Nation's. Personally, I think people are daunted by the story's length — about 25,000 words — and perhaps haven't even read it. Not to mention that the New York Times seems gun-shy about picking on GM, which is mad about the paper's coverage of SUVs; the Times' excellent Detroit reporter Keith Bradsher has been accused of conducting a jihad against sport utility vehicles and, while this overstates it, the auto makers certainly deserve a jihad on this score. The Times dropped the ball on recently uncovered links between GM and the Nazis, which were noted last year by the Washington Post.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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