100LL should have been banned 20 years ago. It’s bad for our engines and it’s horrible for the environment. I know most here on AvWeb don’t really care about clean air or the environment that our children and grandchildren will inherit (your insults of “Tree Huggers” say all we need to know about your own character), but I would expect that you would at least care about the health and longevity of your engines, so everyone should be cheering this on.
The only reason we do not yet have a fully approved drop-in replacement for 100LL is that there has not really been any sense of urgency to replace it. History shows that necessity is the mother if invention and when we really need to get something done, humans are capable of working miracles. Had the EPA outlawed 100LL 20 years, or had the one and only manufacturer of TEL decided to stop producing it, the entire industry would have gone all-in on a UL replacement and we would not be having these arguments right now.
The greater the pressure to eliminate 100LL, the sooner we can get 100UL into our airplanes. And as production of 100UL scales up and more manufacturers get their formulas approved, economy of scale will bring the price of 100UL back to where 100LL would be. And since unleaded fuel does not require the special handling and transport that leaded fuel requires, more savings can be realized.
Most of the comments here waste digital space attacking environmentalism and fatalistically predicting the end of GA in the U.S., but smart people will see this as a positive step towards getting rid of a fuel that dirty for our engines and a health hazard for the entire world.