We Are Making A Difference

German research has shown that organisations like ours are the catalyst in the move to rid the earth of leaded petrol. Jale Tosun of the University of Kronstanz, Germany, recently found that the only significant factors in relation to the world phase out of leaded petrol were per capita income and the number of environmental NGO’s in a particular country. The higher the per capita income and the more NGO’s on the ground, the quicker lead is removed from petrol.

Disturbingly, Tosun found that ‘international economic and institutional interlinkage have no robust significant effects on the phase-out of lead from gasoline’. In other words, international agreements to phase out leaded gasoline vary greatly in their capacity to bind the signatories and are in many cases simply ignored by the governments of developing nations.

There is no substitute, it seems, for vigorous home grown groups campaigning for the removal of lead from petrol. Given this, and the success of activists in developed countries, we should turn our attention to assisting organisations in less developed countries to organize viable campaigns to eradicate the scourge of leaded gasoline. See The Internationalization of National Lead Reduction Regulations: Do International Factors Affect National Decisions to Phase-out Lead from Gasoline?