Lead is a bad example, unless you mean long forgotten times. Even Romans knew:

> The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems

https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historic...

Asbestos, likewise, was being used 80 years after the discovery of ill effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asbestos_disease_medic...

Radium's danger was known 2 years after its discovery according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium#Hazards

I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them.

But they don't support the thesis that we might find something unpleasant about power electronics that we don't yet know about.

> I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them.

I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first research realising there's a problem to general scientific consensus to then one or both of public awareness becoming big enough that companies have to respond and stop choosing profit over safety, or government concern needs to become great enough to enforce it through regulation.

I think we're seeing it with plastics at the moment, it seems very likely that in 50 years we'll a) know much more about the harm micro-plastics do and b) look back at now and think "there was enough evidence, why didn't they ban it immediately?" Well, because it's really convenient and cheap, companies don't want to give up profits, people like me don't want to give up convenient packaging etc, and governments don't want to piss off consumers and businesses at the same time by banning it too fast. Similar story for the climate crisis.

We already know that microplastics are dangerous (BPA, leeching of random compounds, plankton overpopulation, animals with stuffed stomachs), there's no need to wait 50 years more.

Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting harmful effects, and good at not taking them into account.

But that's not what the parent implied.

I don’t think you’ve followed completely the phases that need to be gone through: the fact that microplastics are still being produced is the most straightforward demonstration that can be had on the fact that companies are still to be forced by the general public to stop producing them

Yeah but we happily painted our walls with it even just 20 years ago.

I’d be less worried about long term effects and more worried about the fact that lithium-ion is very flammable. It’s bad enough that airlines ban lithium of quantities no more than a single smartphone from entering the cargo bay of a passenger airliner.

And then you have an entire car’s worth just strapped to the bottom of your chassis.

> more worried about the fact that lithium-ion is very flammable

As is standard fuel used in combustion engines (which you know) so how does the argument of flammability hold stronger here?

Ford Pinto blew up due to tank puncture during an accident.

Metal fires (class D) are much harder to fight than petroleum fires (class B). They can burn way hotter, reignite after seemingly going out, and of course react to water to produce hydrogen.

Current fire fighter directives for putting out BEVs is either dump a loader bucket of sand on it (which most don't have yet), or drag it some place safe and let it burn out.

Also gasoline just sits there until ignited. Lithium battery packs can have various failure modes which send them into thermal runaway. Chevy Bolt EVs are being recalled en masse and owners told not to charge overnight or in a garage, least it go off unattended.

I'm very pro EV but lithium is spicy.

I'm also very pro EV. Working in self-driving and hybrids/EVs driving around in prototype vehicles I often found the on-board GPS jammed. I just found it unnerving to drive around in a vehicle emitting such strong EMF even on-board devices go haywire. That made me think.

As the sibling post said, lithium fires are a completely different class and beast than a petroleum fire.

Material science improvements won’t overcome the fundamental fact that the third atomic element on the periodic table just really wants to light things on fire.

I'd argue those issues are very well researched and material science fixed these.

Worse than inhaled gasoline and diesel exhaust? Doubtful em radiation is worse than particulate matter.

This line of reasoning makes littke sense. The fact that certain things were incorrectly labeled as harmless should definitely inform how we go about determining id something is harmful. But the leap that we should expect harmless-seeming things to be harmful is unhelpful.

It's not far removed from flatearthers/qanon/911-truthers/moonhoax people defending theie stance by naming conspiracies thought false at the time but later revealed as true. Such events, and your speculations, are merely examples of the fact that we're sometimes wrong. Not that we should live our lives expecting that every accepted fact is wrong.