Skip Navigation
38 comments

  • Planes don't spray chemicals. But they do dump jet fuel into the air above cities when they're too heavy to land safely.

    Of course if the safer option is available they'll dump it into the nearest body of water, or generally uninhabited terrain such as farmlands or forests.

    That said they're flying high above and the fuel is sprayed at a slow enough rate relative to the speed of the plane that they aerosolize and just ride the wind to gently blanket the earth with their cool embrace.

    • Jet fuel combustion products aren't really produced in a quantity that would be harmful at the ground level, either. There's all sorts of nasty stuff in there, like sulfur dioxide and a ton of VOCs, but they're all produced in such small quantities relative to the volume of the atmosphere that they don't have much of any direct interaction with people or things on the ground.

      The greenhouse effect and rain acidification definitely affects people, but they're not directly exposed to the chemicals in question. If you live near an airport runway, you might have an exposure problem from jet fuel.

      I live near a flight school, so there's constantly a bunch of prop planes flying around in about a 40km radius around my place. Prop planes run on leaded avgas, and they're constantly spraying tetraethyl lead into the atmosphere. Since the flight school opened here, there's been a recorded year-over-year increase in the water table lead levels and childhood lead exposure. Pb(C₂H₅)₄ is more massive than SO₂ or NOx, so it drops out of the sky in the local environment.

      Commercial aviation sucks, absolutely, but the overwhelming environmental impact from aviation is from private aviation. This should be a no-brainer, your local dentist's Cessna should be under just as much criticism as Taylor Swift's private jet.

      Recreational aviators have had the FAA wrapped around their fingers for decades, and have prevented the removal of TEL from avgas for decades because it would "ruin" their hobby by potentially making the fuel slightly more expensive, potentially having slightly reduced performance with some older engines, and most importantly because it doesn't "smell as good."

    • Comfy

  • Jet fuel exhaust is literally chemtrails. It does exactly what the conspiracy theorists say. It's a slow kill agent

    It's just another example of 'the socialism of the ignorant' seeing real things and inventing elaborate motivations for them instead of just realizing capitalists don't give a fuck.

  • They're just going to release a meta study that shows more vaccines correlate to more autism and call it done. They'll just say correlation equals causation, ban vaccines, and move on to a world full of dead children

  • Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I think exposure to air pollution in vivo (particularly in third trimester) is one of the few definitive connections to autism spectrum? I've talked about this to some chud relatives I have as it's a funny thing to watch them try to contend with. I honestly don't know a ton about it besides some blurbs I've read and double checking that the research exists

38 comments