Private aviation in the US is still, somehow, allowed to use leaded avgas for small planes. It’s a small market but still enough to have an impact on the communities near airports. The FAA has shown little interest in the impact of the problem, and one can only hope the EPA will step in at some point. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
Is it worth trying to apply pressure at the local level? I read that Santa Clara County banned 100LL in January.
I have young kids. We live near Hanscom Field and spend a lot of time near Barnstable Airport. Should we try writing our local airports/cities/counties?
At Barnstable Airport, the big operator is Cape Air. They make a big show of being green, so maybe they'd want to be early adopters of G100UL. Does anyone know if the existing G100UL STC applies to Cape Air's fleet? Could they switch to it if they wanted to?
Adding to the data above some of my personal opinion, which was informed by visiting GAMI's Ada, OK facility, taking the APS course (taught by the GAMI principal engineer), and having seen the fuel demonstrated on the higher-strung TIO-540 Navajo engine: that the 402C's engines would run just fine on G100UL without operational limitations, but as above they cannot legally do that today.
That's very helpful. Thanks for explaining! It looks like the Lycoming O-540 engines on Cape Air's new Tecnam Travellers aren't on the list either.
I'm glad you think that G100UL should work in the Cessna engines and it's "just" a bureaucratic issue. Do you have any sense of what the current blocker to approval is? I found Paul Bertorelli's AVweb article a bit hard to follow.
I can't fairly represent the FAA's point of view here.
I'm not saying that to be cagey; I just haven't spent tons of time thinking about all of the "what could go wrong?" and "why is airplane certification done the way it's done?" It's easy to sit on the outside and say "that's ridiculously overly conservative!" but I suspect the truth is there is a mix of over-conservative and genuine purpose to "until you prove it via certification, it's not certified as true".
Air-cooled engines have wildly varying operating conditions. Airplanes need to take off not just on a 60ºF sea-level departure to a 3000' cruise, but also at a 105ºF departure from 5000' with a direct climb over terrain to 15K feet. The fuel will sometimes be 125ºF after baking in a tank or a wing all day. It might not be on the exact centerline of the specification range. It might be 6 months old and some of the higher volatility compounds present in reduced amounts. High-strung turbo engines with fixed timing live with pretty low detonation margins, especially at partial mixture settings. Pilots rely on the pilot-operating-handbook or airplane-flight-manual for performance calculations with regards to runway utilization, accelerate-stop/accelerate-go distances, all engine climb gradient and one-engine-INOP climb gradient. Any amount of performance degradation that would invalidate those figures is cause for FAA rejection of the STC. Having flown a handful of heavy, hot, and high departures where the ground isn't falling away from the airplane nearly as quickly as I'd like, I can appreciate a certain amount of conservatism here.
So, I have to give the FAA some benefit of the doubt as I'm not an expert on certification topics. I do believe in the technical ability and already completed lab, bench, and flight testing that GAMI has done and the way they've set out to approach the problem, but to be fair and balanced, they've done some amount of "we think the FAA/PAFI process is fundamentally the wrong approach and we're going to go about it this other way that we think is superior." I happen to think they're right, but when you very publicly do that to a government agency who said they want the process to work this other way and you don't participate in their preferred process, I think it's reasonable to expect that you'll run into delays. (Even if no FAA person is acting in the least bit unethically; you're just trying to use a different process than the one they're putting their energy into and even if everyone has the best intentions, that will cause friction and slowdowns.)
There's an old saying that "aviation regulations are written in blood". If there's an FAA rule it most likely came about from the learning of an accident investigation.
If I had a nickle for every time some dolt busted out the "written in blood" quip for a rule that had no blood involved I'd be a very rich man.
Lots and lots and lots of rules, especially post 1970 or so are about ass-covering. Post 1980 you get a lot of rules designed to remove human judgement from the equation.
I would complain to anyone who will listen. The health effects of lead exposure are well known, and a suitable replacement is available. Any continued combustion of leaded avgas is out of apathy and laziness. The FAA is dragging their feet because there is no cost to them to do so.
I know nothing of the technical details, so you are saying, no one would need to change anything with their engines etc and just switch to leadfree gasoline?
> To scrub the playhead forward, last summer at Oshkosh, to great fanfare, the STC approving G100UL was announced. It applied to a limited number of engines and GAMI was tasked with additional testing and data work to expand the engine list. This it did. The Wichita Aircraft Certification Office duly sent a letter to FAA HQ reporting that GAMI met all the test requirements—best-run program they had ever seen, or words to that effect—and was entitled to an STC-AML with every single spark ignition engine in the FAA database approved to use G100UL.
...
> At a press conference, Lawrence said he thought PAFI had been “a great success.” I simply cannot agree. I don’t know how anyone in the industry could think this. PAFI was supposed to yield an unleaded drop-in replacement for 100LL. It did not. It was an abject failure and now, even though the FAA has an STC in hand awaiting approval for a fuel that has been proven, ad nauseum, to work in all engines, it wants more money for more testing. While the PAFI program—that was Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative—supposedly produced data, accessing it is all but impossible.
I think applying local pressure (I.e. the Santa Clara approach) will only annoy pilots and get their political associations (AOPA, EAA, etc.) to dig in and fight bans and closures. In general, pilots of small planes desperately want to switch away from leaded gasoline too! We all want the same thing. I have a family that I don’t want lead poisoned, too. But I’m not going to simply stop flying airplanes indefinitely waiting for the FAA to get its shit together.
Trying to get 100LL banned is like those protestors blocking rush hour traffic to advocate for their cause—it is unlikely to be effective, and it more likely just makes any potential allies into enemies.
Thank you, that's really helpful context. I can easily imagine that failure mode playing out. The last thing we need is for it to become some kind of culture war.
Maybe local pressure would be more appropriate once the FAA approves G100UL for all engines. Then it could be about encouraging airports to make sure G100UL is actually available, and getting airlines like Cape Air to switch over their fleets.
> Brightly colored spices, such as turmeric, chili powder, and paprika, are the ones I'm concerned with more because those are the ones that are more likely to have lead added in as a coloring agent
Holy shit. This is a "the FDA should be coming down on this hard yesterday" kind of thing.
It’s especially crazy because because all the major engine manufacturers have already certified many of their leaded gas engines for high octane unleaded. Some of them are just waiting on FAA rubber stamps. https://www.aopa.org/advocacy/100-unleaded-avgas
Correct. The FAA is set up to be default quite conservative (small c... "Reluctant to change things without a lot of work"). This makes a lot of sense given what they do (an amortized cost to public health over decades is a lot less likely to get people fired than a private plane falling out of the sky into the middle of an elementary school because the engine failed mid-flight due to a new fuel changing the mean time between failure in an unexpected way), but it does mean that even when things are understood to be safe and proven safe, simple inertia can keep the FAA from certifying them until someone lights a damn fire under them.
Although on this specific topic, I almost wonder if you could make a case that the unleaded avgas is safer not for public health, but for the private pilot and therefore the public in terms of the FAA's main understanding of safety (IE don't let planes crash). How much is a pilot's reasoning capacity compromised by chronic lead poisoning due to the necessary handling of avgas and breathing in fumes that they must do in operation of their plane?
Who is forcing them to fly this plane? I'm going to have to side with the rights of the people to not have lead dumped into their air over the right of someone to fly their own plane.
Air taxis, fire suppression, medevac, flight training, search and rescue, geomapping, aerial application, police, etc.
Very few of these high compression, high HP planes are flown by people just "flying our own plane". Most of us fly small planes that can easily burn unleaded.
My bad - should have restated that - I thought it was certified for a lot of planes and airports but not all (that it can potentially be certified for) and that there is a lot of potential there as a fix
It covers about 80% of engine models, but only about 30% of total fuel purchased for those engines per year. (The high power airplanes fly more hours per year, resulting in a large spread between “engines” and “gallons per year” eligible.)
2. It only applies to low compression engines, which is a lot of engines, but which also rules out most airplanes made since the 70s. There's a few exceptions, but not significant in terms of manufactured numbers to matter. (the STC you're likely talking about is the one that let engines run on 80 octane)
If the MoGas STC mattered then pilots would have adopted it because rec fuel (ethanol free gasoline) is significantly cheaper than AvGas
1. The cost of the STC rounds to $0. I think when I started flying it used to be $1 per horsepower; it looks like it’s still under $1000, which represents no barrier.
#2 and the low availability of mogas at airports is the reason for a lack of adoption fleet wide.
Exactly. You can barely sustain a fuel farm on the fuel that services 100% of the piston GA fleet. It's incredibly difficult to make the economics work to add a second fuel farm that serves only 30% of the gasoline sold, cannibalizing sales from your other fuel farm.
That's the premise/promise of G100UL: it can serve all the spark-ignition piston aircraft.
No, it wouldn't be that much higher for mogas (typically a 91-ish octane unleaded, E0 (ethanol-free) gasoline).
If there were an unleaded 100-ish octane fuel legally available as a substitute, that would have demand if 100LL were banned. Over 70% of the avgas burned is burned in airplanes that are not eligible for the STC* to allow them to burn mogas (typically as a result of having lower worst-case detonation margins as a result of being turbo-charged, super-charged, high-compression, or some combination).
* - Supplemental Type Certificate - an airplane modification, in this case a mostly [entirely for most airframes] paperwork modification, to their original type certificate.
In addition to the above, the STC requires that automotive gas with 0% ethanol be used. In many parts of the country, that is extremely difficult to find. In my area, the only place to buy it is one farm co-op that is way out in the country. In some places, it is not available at all. Luckily there's a website to find it, but places that carry it have been getting fewer and fewer. So the MoGas STC is not a long-term 100LL workaround.
I'd like to see a risk comparison to measure the effects of living near an airport with heavy avgas users in units of tuna-sandwich-equivalents per month.
Yes exposure isn't zero and effects from that exposure aren't zero, but let's get a good idea of how big the effect size is, because it really seems like some people have an out-of-proportion idea of what the risk actually is.
I'm much more concerned about the heavy metal exposure from nearby coal plants than I am by general aviation fuel.
I agree with this methodology. People should use a different sort function for their outrage. It's like how people fail to compare the number of cancers caused by radioactive release from coal plants vs nuclear plants. The latter seems like it would be more of a problem, but actually the former is far far worse.
Until then, here's a good podcast episode interviewing George Braly, the man behind G100UL. [0]
Incidentally I recall a later episode mentioning that a couple of decades ago someone was able to get an unleaded fuel approved for aviation in, iirc, Sweden. Unsure why that didn't get much traction.
"an area where 2.5 percent of children under 6 years old who were tested had detectable levels of lead in their blood"
"The presence of this fuel means the areas near these airports are often inundated with tiny lead particles"
I agree that we should find lead free alternatives (some exist, so it sounds like this is purely bureaucracy). There's really no reason to keep using it.
That said, it seems there is some fear mongering going on in this article. If the air is truly inundated, why is it that only 2.5% of the kids have a detectable level? If it's in the air and everywhere, then it should be detectable in vastly more children in that area. The biggest question in my mind is, why is this area so low when 50% of US children have detectable lead levels?
When people look to solutions of the free market this is an interesting example.
We knew lead from petrol was poisoning everything -- deformed babies, ruined ecosystems etc. and yet the price incentive ensured it would never be dropped as a consumer product -- people kept buying leaded petrol as the cost would always be externalized somewhere else. The government had to step in and and ban the practice. Why didn't the free market solve this particular problem?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson looked at Clare Patterson's work (the whistleblower of leaded petrol being harmful) in an episode of Cosmos. Highly recommend it -- very interesting episode.
> Why didn't the free market solve this particular problem?
The Free Market doesn't care about externalities. Whichever solution produces the desired results for the lowest amount of money wins. If it happens to destroy the environment in the process the market has no idea because the environment isn't on the market. This is the reason regulation exists, and why sometimes regulation causes companies to go out of business, because the regulation can't be applied globally and if there is somewhere else in the world where the environment can be destroyed to produce the product more cheaply then that is what will happen. It is a tragedy that we apply environmental regulation locally when the environment is a shared global resource.
It's not just the "free market" it's human nature; unless presented with an immediate pressing issue, people will not choose the "best option" in many cases. Smoking is a perfect example, and it goes downhill from there.
The international economy is a de facto "free" market, or at least freër on the whole than its constituent countries. This can lead to a "race to the bottom", with the most damaging activities concentrated in the most permissive jurisdictions. That's where we — qua humanity — run into trouble.
I think it is more timescales. The effects aren't externalized from the market, they are externalized to some point in the future. Eventually the market will collide with the massive pile of externalities laying in its future path.
Lead gas would eventually reach the point of doing so much damage that people wouldn't want to use it anymore, even if it was cheaper. Even if it didn't get to this point, eventually it would be killing/debilitating so many people that it phases itself out.
> Lead gas would eventually reach the point of doing so much damage that people wouldn't want to use it anymore, even if it was cheaper. Even if it didn't get to this point, eventually it would be killing/debilitating so many people that it phases itself out.
For that to be the case:
(a) you'd have to be able to make the causal link between societal damage and lead from vehicle fuel, which isn't something most people are capable of doing as individuals
(b) you'd have to have a choice in the matter as an individual consumer, which you didn't have for cars, because automakers produced engines that (they said) required lead gasoline, and the situation is similar for AV fuel
Yes, if an aspect of the product doesn't directly affect its price on the market today then it is invisible.
This is why pure market solutions don't work. But at the same time markets are by far the most efficient way to distribute limited resources so you want to use them as much as you can. You just have to remember that they are no good for solving problems you can't put a price on and you may have to artificially weight the market to account for side effects.
>Yes, if an aspect of the product doesn't directly affect its price on the market today then it is invisible.
I'm saying that there is no invisible effect, just so small it can't (initially) be detected. But it is inherently additive, and one day (days, years, centuries, millennia) the market will correct for it.
Here is how a free market can solve problems like these:
Lead pollution in the air damages people's property. The owners of that property can then sue the lead emitters for damages.
This has practical problems when the externality is very small for each emitter and each damaged party, but that's the principle.
Typically modern regulations kills this recourse, since if you've followed the regulations, you can't be sued for it. Then the emitters sooner or later capture the regulator, and things go bad anyway.
"Lead pollution in the air damages people's property. The owners of that property can then sue the lead emitters for damages."
Rather difficult to demonstrate any harm to an individual, no? In a case, the damage from lead would be a hypothetical: my child would have had a higher IQ if she weren't exposed to lead, and that exposure is due to its use as a motor fuel.
Yes, that is what I meant by the "This has practical problems.." part.
CO₂ emissions is the extreme case of this difficulty. Almost everyone contributes a tiny part to the problem, and almost everyone is also a potential victim of it.
Because of that, I'm not categorically opposed to regulation handling these difficult situations. But I also note that airplane fuel IS regulated, and that has NOT solved the problem!
The best solution to CO₂ emissions is some form of carbon tax, but that has proven politically impossible in most jurisdictions.
We can certainly stipulate how things should work in a fantasyland where everyone behaves rationally and courts produce principled decisions. But that isn't the world where we actually live. And this is where most of capital-L Libertarian ideology falls apart.
How many times has someone successfully sued for some fractional externality that harms them, and was the suit ever enough to effect change?
Even if there are one or two cases, that's hardly a "long track record" compared to the inability of private citizens to sue to enact meaningful change in climate change, asbestos, leaded gas, fracking, polluted oceans, acid rain, deforestation, lead in the water, chemicals in our food supply, etc etc etc.
Well, the solution proposed 100 years ago was to blend ethanol in with the gasoline. Ethanol has one oxygen atom leading to more even combustion (less explosive, less 'knock', more complete combusyion) in an ICE. You have to blend in ~10%. Tetra-ethyl-lead does the same thing but at a concentration of 1% or so IIRC, with lead serving the same role as oxygen. Later on, a compound called MTBE (methyl-tert-butyl-ether) which contains oxygen was used, but has been mostly phased out in the USA due to serious groundwater contamination issues related to leaking storage tanks.
The basic market reason ethanol wasn't used originally is that it was produced by farmers not by oil distillers, so this meant taking profits away from the oil sector and giving them to the agricultural sector. There's some evidence that one reason the JD Rockefeller pushed Prohibition in the USA was to lock farmers out of the automobile fuel business. Since 2003 in California at least, ethanol is the major fuel additive that's replaced TEL and MTBE.
Markets are not free in the energy sector, they're highly controlled and monopolized, and basically always have been. This is why many counties have chosen to essentially nationalize their energy production and distribution systems. All other market activity relies on a stable energy supply, it's similar to water in that respect.
> Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were processed, doctored by chemicals, and mislabeled for sale to the public. He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around. He explained how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as "potted chicken."
> Sinclair wrote that meat for canning and sausage was piled on the floor before workers carried it off in carts holding sawdust, human spit and urine, rat dung, rat poison, and even dead rats. His most famous description of a meat-packing horror concerned men who fell into steaming lard vats:
> . . . and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, --sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!
In this case however the free market has solved the problem, Lycoming and the other mainstream aviation engine manufacturers have tested their engines with unleaded (G100UL) and are ready to go.
It's the regulatory body, the FAA that makes it illegal to use G100UL for most aircraft.
It's often the case: Make profit, externalize the costs. Fracking is another very good example.
Actually, the more you think about it many of very profitable companies do profit by externalizing the costs. That's also why they put so much money into lobbying: So no one will change the system.
I sense that you're using "marshmallow test" as shorthand or euphemism for essentially calling people stupid, or undisciplined. Basically saying that as long as people have some agency to avoid a consequence, experiencing that consequence is their choice and fault.
Anyway these things and more are part of "the market" too. If a market framework can't find effective solutions in the presence of real people with human faults and weaknesses, then what value is it to us?
I think there is a way to solve it within market but without hard regulations.
Everyone who lives near airport where leaded fuel is used should go to court and ask for large sum as compensation for possible health problem. And amount should be so bug that selling this fuel would become very unprofitable.
> When people look to solutions of the free market this is an interesting example.
I think it is weird that people are still all for Laissez-Faire economics, considering we've tried it several times in history and it has always failed miserably (in before the ~~communists~~ say "but that wasn't _real_ Laissez-Faire). We literally saw it lead to quazi governments (meaning it literally destroys itself). I do believe capitalism has a lot of advantages, but no system is perfect. There probably is no global optima for the solution space. Worse, the solution space is dynamic! Good news is that we do know that multi-agent reinforcement games are pretty good at finding local optima (though they can often get trapped in local optima that we don't want). I think if you understand this it is clear that we need a body that can react to the dynamic nature of both the environment and desires (of the people) that can continually optimize and update the rules. I do think there's debate of how to do this, but I think it is very clear that too heavy of a hand isn't good and neither is too light of a hand. A pure competitive system can't account for externalizes or better yet, tragedy of the commons. As our world becomes even more complex and interconnected, and as we understand more about our environment and consequences of our actions, it is imperative that we think about these issues in a far more nuanced way and avoid thinking there are "correct" answers (as opposed to "good enough").
The free market obviously didn't work because it was a third party being harmed - unless you're in a capitalist anarchy like Snowcrash with gangs for hire there is no market-based mechanism for representing the interests of anyone not party to a sale. The real question is why the liability plus liability insurance system (the actual alternative to regulation) did not work. Why did those companies not fear litigation when it started becoming known that they could be subject to a class action with the size of the entire population?
The problem here was the regulator injected into the process has gone full snail speed on approving unleaded for aviation use. Oh, and as far a liability goes, that would be the FAA that held things up, not the engine manufacturers, gas producers or plane owners. So the regulator was the problem.
I was wondering which generation was the most poisoned by the lead: well it's Gen-X:
"Researchers found that estimated lead-linked deficits were greatest for people born between 1966 and 1970, a population of about 20.8 million people, which experienced an average deficit of 5.9 IQ points per person."
One can compare lead added to gasoline with carcinogens added to cigarettes. Both were introduced to make the use of the product smoother, and with it came massive health issues, and both industries funded fraudulent studies to create the false impression the product was safe. While carcinogens are still added to cigarettes, and will be forever since while the government's case against Big Tobacco revealed the practice, banning the practice was not included in the settlement for inexplicable reasons, and most of the massive fine was ultimately forgiven by the early naughts. Oddly, health issues are not the reason why leaded gasoline was phased out; it was phased out because leaded gas fowled catalytic converters, which were mandated to reduce emissions.
Humorously, my recollection is that President Reagan asked someone to do a cost benefit analysis to support his desire to weaken controls on lead gasoline and the guy in charge did the opposite and his cost benefit analysis showed that we would save tons of money by eliminating lead, so that's how lead gasoline got eliminated in the US.
My recollection is this was the end of this guy's government career but he won some kind of award (a la Nobel Prize levels of money from somewhere) that let him pay cash for a house while working as a professor -- or something like that. I tried to do a search and came up with this article that fits with that recollection but doesn't exactly verify the details I remember and I have no idea how to track down the guy's name, etc etc.
This is kind of crazy since the technology to move away from leaded gasoline or fuels has been around for DECADES. The fact that anyone is still using tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive is horrendous. We can hit right around 100% octanes right now too from a synthetic chemistry perspective.
It took 26 years to remove a simple additive from automotive gasoline in the US. Talk about slow walking a change. Under a similar bureaucracy, it'll probably take a 100 years plus to phase ICE cars entirely
Depending on how you measure it, the first concerns over global warming and the "greenhouse effect" were penned what is already over 100 years ago (though regarding coal, not gasoline), and scientists have been aware of the growing magnitude of the issue for around half a century.
Not linked from the article for some reason is a great, and very readable, paper "The U.S. Experience with the Phasedown of Lead in Gasoline" https://web.mit.edu/ckolstad/www/Newell.pdf . I found it a fascinating and inspiring story of everything that went into the transition, including setting up dedicated public banks to help refineries manage the investments they would need to make.
I was glad CA did this, because suddenly every big box store is selling electric lawn equipment that was designed in this century. Just a few years ago I went looking for an electric lawnmower and they were still using 6v lead acid batteries for 20 minutes of runtime on a 12" blade and cost a small fortune. Two years ago suddenly everybody has affordable lithium powered modular battery systems. Granted, they're all made out of cheap plastic, but getting people actually buying them is the most important first step in getting good and affordable equipment.
While they're writing regulations about it, I wish they'd mandate a standard for rechargeable batteries for the lawn equipment. As it stands, we get proprietary standards like cordless power tools where batteries have something like 90% margins.
> I wish they'd mandate a standard for rechargeable batteries for the lawn equipment.
This has never occurred to me but that seems obvious. I wonder if it's just not something on lawmaker's radar.
We know that all tool makers will scream and say "how can we be sure 3rd party batteries won't explode in our tools?" I wonder if there could be some sort of certification for both batteries and tools that would mitigate such an issue.
> "how can we be sure 3rd party batteries won't explode in our tools?"
Hopefully the response to that would just be laughter.
IIRC, many of the proprietary batteries used in power tools today use commodity cells internally, either 18650s or 20650s. Not many (any?) are developing their own proprietary cells. Their secret sauce is the plastic shell and connector shape.
What we need, IMO, is standardized sizes and quick-connectors for batteries that are about 10-20x the capacity of an 18650. Big enough for the kind of power a tool needs, small enough that there's not much excuse for a hand tool or lawn mower not to fit them.
> Their secret sauce is the plastic shell and connector shape.
And load leveling, over/under current protection, metering UI, etc etc. Also, not all 18650s have the same characteristics for dis|charge rates, and capacity.
I assume power tool manufacturers use commodity charging circuits, rather than trying to second guess with their own proprietary creation.
> Also, not all 18650s have the same characteristics for dis|charge rates, and capacity.
This is true, but I have one charger that handles them all. Not just 18650s, either, but bigger batteries and smaller ones too. It is a solved problem, and not something that a power tool manufacturer needs to try to solve again.
Having watched a few Big Clive amd AvE teardown videos of various doodads, my impression is that manufacturers have different opinions about circuit optimization.
Different cells and cell configurations have different requirements for charging and discharging. You can discharge cells too rapidly damage the cells and potentially cause a fire.
This has never occurred to me but that seems obvious. I wonder if it's just not something on lawmaker's radar.
It appears to kinda be. I've got the following equipment from Lowe's (U.S. home improvement store) Kobalt brand:
1. Mower
2. Weed trimmer
3. Electric snow shovel
...all of which take the same battery. But the same battery from Lowe's that (as others point out) probably has a 90% margin. And I think it is a fair question on the part of the manufacturers to ask, "how do we know those other batteries aren't going to go 'pop'?" The standard would have to be segmented as well. I don't to drag around a drill that is using the same battery as the lawn mower; my forearms aren't in that good shape.
All of that said, it is nice to just pull a battery off the lawn equipment charger and not worry about which battery goes where.
It's very effective. Almost 100% of my cordless power tools are DeWalt, for exactly that reason. E.g. I'm in the market now for a cordless air compressor, and it turns out that DeWalt makes one that takes the 20V batteries just like the other tools I carry. Of course it's first on the list.
If the lawmakers would just make 4 standards: 2 milwaukee (12 and 18 volt), 2 DeWalk (12v and 20/60 flex) it would cover most people who care about keeping their existing tools and be good enough for everything.
> As it is if you care you can get adapters on eBay/Amazon for cheap.
In my experience, that's usually from one proprietary format to another (e.g. I have an adapter to use older "18V" DeWalt batteries in newer "20V" tools. But I haven't had much luck finding an adapter that would let me use 18650s in my cordless drills.
I have a Greenworks leaf blower, trimmer, and chainsaw. They all take the same battery cartridge, and they sell their tools without batteries so you only have to buy one battery and swap it around as needed. There are third party battery packs that will work as well.
Got an electric mower a few years ago for a small lawn. Quiet, cordless, zero maintenance.
Moved houses and got a bigger lawn. Got an electric riding mower - a big one - to make sure it could handle the lawn in 1 go. It was expensive, but again zero maintenance, no gas, oil etc, always charged and ready to go.
I have been impressed so far. Next up electric car.
Got solar panels to charge my electric devices. I'm aiming for the long game - hoping it'll pay off in the long run both in cost and environmental.
Why not hire a mowing service? Also expensive, but it puts more velocity into the local economy, is much more efficient (all that lithium and plastic to be used for an hour once a week?), and frees up your valuable time.
I considered it, but a couple of reasons. 1. cost - compared to the service, the mower should pay for itself in about 2 years, so everything after is saving money. 2. emissions - i want to reduce emissions and the mowing service is not on electric.
Both of these have up front costs, but in the long run I think they are worth it.
Honestly, a way better approach is to just stop having lawns that need mowing. More people need to plant native species that actually belong there instead of a monoculture of invasive plants. And, much more importantly in some drought-prone areas, plants that need little or no irrigation.
Does anyone know how to get in touch with media outlets to run these stories?
I can't help but notice how some of the issues brought up by John Oliver made decent progress after they ran an episode on it.
They have an episode on lead, but it was focused on Flint.
Everyone here should send an email to the address at the bottom of "FAA, do your damn job" and to one of the writers of John Oliver. That may get people to apply the right pressure for a change.
So the investigation says they made half of the students use Twitter to analyze a novel by posting quotes and their own reflections & commenting on tweets written by their classmates, while the others relied on traditional classroom teaching methods.
The winner is visible from a mile away, but the takeaway for me is that using the wrong tool for the job is stupid, not that Twitter itself makes you dumb.
You seem to suggest you think that Twitter is the right tool for some job. Using it had, manifestly, the observed effect, regardless of what other tool might or might not be deployed elsewhere. Using another tool simultaneously enabled quantifying that effect.
