Brian McCarry may be a university professor at McMaster University and the head of the chemistry department there, but he doesn't talk like any high-fallutin’ Ph.D.
He talks like a guy who's very frustrated that, when it comes to air pollution, we still don't get it.
The number of smog days we experienced this summer should have scared the daylights out of us, says McCarry, who was in Mississauga yesterday to deliver a talk about air pollution in the fine joint Mississauga Library-University of Toronto at Mississauga community lecture series.
“I guess the problem is that there's no toe tag on anybody saying they died of air pollution,” McCarry said in a telephone interview before his talk.
“For one of every seven smokers who die, one person dies of air quality problems,” said the much-decorated professor.
Yet, visit any street in Mississauga or stand outside any school here and watch how many people sit in their cars with the engine idling. “Idling should be like smoking in a public place is now,” said McCarry. “But it really flies under the health radar.”
What really depresses the 54-year-old is that, despite overwhelming evidence that our lifestyles are killing us, we don’t seem to care and, as a result, neither does our government.
“More people are dying of air pollution than ever died of SARS,” he points out.
“It’s our lifestyle that’s doing this stuff,” said McCarry, whose research centres on identifying emerging toxins in the environment that may cause genetic mutations.
Turning on the television and watching the ads that try to top each other on engine size and power reminds the Hamilton resident of his younger days.
“All the talk about the horsepower they’re putting out takes me back to the time of the muscle cars when I was a kid.”
In Germany, you can drive a five-litre Mercedes but you pay a premium of $800 a year to license it.
“Here, a seven-litre monster is just considered part of the package,” he laments.
Now that the cost of gas has “dropped” back to 85 cents a litre, it's like the air emission issue, which the Ontario Medical Association estimates cost the provincial economy more than $16 billion a year in health costs and lost production time, has evaporated.
“We all view it as somebody else’s problem,” said the chair of Clean Air Hamilton, a respected advisory group to the municipality’s council. “We just think industry is the problem and if they just cleaned things up, we'd all be fine.
“The fact is most responsible companies are moving to best available technology, but we aren't as citizens.”
Before we start carping at political candidates and environmental watchdogs to solve our pollution problems, we'd probably be better off first taking a long, hard look in the mirror.