Loose Cannon always has a chuckle when he sees, plastered in green ink across the back of a bus belching diesel fumes into the air, 'Environmentally Friendly Engine'.
There's nothing friendly about diesel. Even in the most efficient engines, burning the fuel - still artificially cheap in Hong Kong at just $8 a litre - produces a deadly cocktail of toxic particulates and noxious gases.
Using low-sulphur diesel certainly helps but it doesn't change the fact that thousands of people are sickened and killed every year from ultra-fine particulates spewed into the environment by passing buses and trucks.
In 2000, the California Air Resources Board (Carb) concluded that diesel emissions created 70 per cent of the state's risk of cancer from airborne toxins. Carb determined that diesel pollution caused an estimated 2,700 cases of chronic bronchitis and about 4,400 hospital admissions for cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses every year, resulting in 3,000 premature deaths in the state last year. The health care costs from these effects reached US$21.5 billion every year, Carb said.
These days, Hong Kong is a lot more polluted than Los Angeles - the Californian city with the nastiest air. We also import an indeterminate but sizeable amount of diesel pollution from our neighbours in Guangdong who burn a lot of the filthy fuel in inefficient backyard generators to make up for electricity shortfalls from the power grid.
Using Carb's estimates, at least 6,000 people seek treatment at Hong Kong hospitals every year with illness caused by diesel combustion and 430 people will die prematurely. That calculation assumes that the health impact of diesel emissions in Hong Kong is no worse than it is in California and ignores that most of our population lives and works in heavily polluted areas.
