Innovation Cafe with Gary Shuster, patent litigator and prolific inventor.
Transcript
Hey there. What you’re hearing behind me is a single engine piston airplane. See? I can hear it. That is the only vehicle left in the US that is allowed to use leaded gasoline. Lead is really bad for the environment, but we continue to allow leaded fuel in aircraft that, by the way, fly over our heads. And then the fuel has lead in it that drops on us. Why do we do it? I think that there are ways around it. We could switch to turboprop engines, but there’s an enormous retrofit cost.
This is one of those times where the cost of fixing something is thought to be higher than the cost of not fixing it. I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think that having too much lead in the environment is a huge problem, and a huge cost that will last many, many generations. And we should prohibit it. We should force people to switch to turboprop at least. But for now, that’s why there’s still lead in gasoline in the United States. Catch you next time.