Brow Beat

John Oliver Brought Out Sesame Street’s Elmo to Explain How We Can Stop Poisoning Our Children

As we’ve said many times before, John Oliver specializes in taking topics that might initially seem boring, arcane, or foreign and covering them in a way that’s at once informative and surprisingly entertaining. You wouldn’t think that something that poisons our children would be one of those topics—after all, it’s poisoning our children! And lead poisoning has been with us for a long time. But on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, Oliver took 18 minutes to explain why our nation’s lead problem is much bigger than Flint, Michigan. As Slate itself has pointed out, the problem isn’t just lead pipes but lead paint (yes, still), lead toys, and more.

Why would we ignore such a pressing issue? Oliver argues that we’ve willfully forgotten the scale of America’s lead problem because solving it would be more expensive than we’ve been willing to invest. But, as he also points out, the solution is cost-effective: Even in the crudest economic terms (which is to say, the financial benefits of not poisoning our children), it offers a huge return on investment. If articles like Slate’s weren’t enough, then thankfully Oliver is here with Sesame Street’s Elmo and Oscar the Grouch, to help make us care once again.