Ed,
It's amazing, isn't it? "Coking" is a thing of the past. As much as I love carbs, they are just controlled fuel leaks.
As for lead, there was an interesting article in one of the magazines correlating the spike and subsequent decline in violent crime with the use of lead as a fuel additive. When you think about it, it makes sense-- ceasing to coat the world with a toxic heavy metal proven to cause brain damage was kind've a (literal) no-brainer.
IMHO, the answer to most of the issues we face with energy independence, etc. is with more ethanol, not less. The anti-ethanol rhetoric has come to be part of folklore and common knowledge, a point at which I always wonder what we are missing.
What we are missing is that ethanol, while not perfect, beats the heck out of lead and MTBF as a fuel additive.
