It’s a 10 part piece. Here’s a snippet from the first:
…I was peculiarly well-situated to smell a rat in the late Nineties when I began reading about a furor brewing in the United Kingdom over an European Union directive mandating the removal of lead from gasoline (or petrol as the British know it) in the year 2000. Strangely, the same desperate claims to save lead were being resurrected. Makers of the lead additive were placing alarmist full-page ads in newspapers, filled with the same untruths that had terrified me as a boy twenty years earlier. Government ministers and MPs were up in arms, citing these very falsehoods, some going so far as to urge withdrawal from the European community. Even the traditionally staid Rolls Royce Owners Club were moved to march (actually, drive) on the Houses of Parliament in protest.
How could this be? We’d had the same discussion in America two decades previous, as well as the benefit of the intervening years to learn the truth: the removal of lead from gasoline had hurt no one – other than the makers of the additive – and helped everyone, with American blood lead levels falling an average of 90 percent. It was, if anything, one of the great public health triumphs of the modern world and had been almost entirely painless. Was no one paying attention? Had our information society somehow failed to transmit this vital data tidbit across the pond? Was there no one in all of Europe to correct them?
Didn’t they have a phone? Were there, perhaps, larger forces of disinformation in motion?
What would become an ongoing part of the rest of my life’s work became clear, as I sought find out the real truth about lead in gasoline. The first result of my study, “The Secret History of Lead,” appeared in The Nation magazine in 2000, and made the case that some of America’s biggest corporations – DuPont, its longtime charge General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (today known as ExxonMobil,) – had put lead in gasoline for profit in the 1920s, ignored legitimate health warnings and covered up safer alternatives, which we use today. Translated into 16 languages and a mini-best-seller in France, it remains a piece of history its star players would prefer we forgot.
Jamie Kitman. A Brief History Of Gasoline: A Century And A Half Of Lies. Jalopnik