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The trick to lowering gas prices is driving less, US energy secretary says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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I don't understand why the generation that snacked on lead paint chips is allowed to be in charge of this country.
My understanding is that paint is only very rarely stripped out of existing houses. It's normally just painted over.
In the US, lead paint prohibitions went into place in 1978.
So unless you've avoided being in buildings constructed prior to 1978, you have probably been in buildings with lead paint.
That's not to say that there aren't benefits to painting over lead paint. I'm sure that it reduces the amount of leaded paint dust and such. But a chip can still contain paint from an earlier coat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-based_paint_in_the_United_States
And as long as it's encapsulated like that, it's harmless.
Almost completely, yes.
And as long as you don't eat it and you dispose of it immediately, it's not going to hurt you.
It's good that we terminated the production of lead paint, but unless you're in substandard, ill-maintained housing, you face far greater toxic risks from other household chemicals, gas stoves, old asbestos insulation, etc.
When my kids were little and we were moving into our new to us house, built in 1946, they also cautioned about the outside. Treat 10’ around the house as potentially contaminated from peeling exterior paint. No vegetable gardens in that dirt. No kids playing in that dirt
The risk of lead absorption via skin contact isn't worth even thinking about. So unless the kids were eating substantial volumes of dirt, that's absurdly over-cautious. If you keep them indoors and feed them a tuna sandwich, the mercury dose will exceed the damage done by exposure to lead in household soil, unless something well out of the ordinary is happening.
It's what the American voters wanted.
The bigger lead exposure back in the day was from breathing in particulate emissions from the burning of leaded gasoline. People's lead levels correlated pretty closely with proximity and volume of nearby vehicular traffic.
Eating paint chips was never a big contributor, unless the person was living in some crumbling, damp tenement that was seldom cleaned. It just got popularized by some bullshit Freakonomics pseudo-analysis.
The voters also "snacked on lead paint chips" [sic]