this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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There was the guy who came up with the idea of putting lead into petrol, only to see the environmental devastation. He pledged to make something good to compensate and came up with using freons in refrigeration.
He didn't live ling enough to learn of how this blew a huge hole in the ozone layer, because he died tangled in wires of a special bed he designed.
Thomas Midgley Jr.
To be fair, refrigeration also saved lives. Just because there was a major negative side Effekt doesn't mean it wasn't a good invention.
Yet if there's a single organism that has caused the most environmental damage in all of history of the planet, it has to be him.
Man really did try to fix the world. More than others could say.
He knew lead was a very dangerous neurotoxin and he just didn't care. Capitalists destroying the planet for profit is such a boring evil.
I wonder if he didn't care or if he knew they would keep doing it without him.
Maybe he did try, but he didn't understand his hidden desire to kill himself and everyone. It's in all of us, but we should always strive to suppress it.
According to Bryson's account, he deliberately mislead us about the dangers of tetraethyl lead by making a public demonstration of washing his hands in the chemical. As a chemical engineer he knew a single exposure was not sufficient to cause the lead poisoning that was evident in the workforce at his factory and was counting on a scientifically illiterate public not understanding how toxicity operates in organisms. He was correct on both counts and we can never let the profit motive enter these type of calculations e.g. money in healthcare, oil companies publishing climate science, etc, and expect healthy outcomes.
Jfc
That's literally insane to me. Fortunately we understand mental health better these days.