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Air of confidence

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

In recognition of Mooney’s invention, President Bush will present him with the National Medal of Technology at the White House on Thursday, an award on which the president is said to personally approve. Today, pollution is still a major environmental concern, but there is no doubt that Mooney’s career has made our atmosphere cleaner than it might have been.
For Mooney, Thursday will be a proud moment. But his reward has come to him already over the years, he says. Everyone breathes cleaner air, not least our children, because the advent of the catalytic converter also meant the demise of leaded gasoline: converters would not work with leaded fuel and so in the 1970s Congress phased out the adding of lead to fuel.
Lead pollution in the atmosphere, at one time amounting to 250,000 tons per year in the U.S., has been cited as causing a child’s IQ to fall by as much as 7 points, as well as other serious health problems.
“If you rubbed your finger on your desk in New York City,” Mooney said, “and analyzed the dust, it would have been full of lead.”
Lead is only part of the story. According to figures cited by Mooney, catalytic converters have destroyed more than 500 million tons of carbon monoxide and more than 50 million tons of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons each since the 1970s.
So how much is that? Mooney put it in perspective thus: “500 million tons of carbon monoxide is enough to fill 150 million Astrodomes with a lethal dose.”
Today, Mooney has a different role than that of inventor — he’s become a missionary for the technology that has helped clean up U.S. air, although pollution is still a major concern here.
“We’re trying to get Africa, the Middle East, Asia to adopt this technology,” Mooney said, speaking from his home in Paterson, N.J., where he has lived all his life.
One of six children born to immigrants Mary and Denis Mooney, he has spent the last few years liaising with governments in polluted parts of the world, pushing the case for converters and citing the U.S. as an example.
“We formed a small non-profit to help small countries,” Mooney said. “We guide them how to fix the problem and I also work with a United Nations group.”
He paused, laughed, and added, “I work my ass off on this.”
The missionary work is paying off — but slowly. Recently the Association of Southeast Asian nations agreed to tie member states to a timetable for the introduction of catalytic converters. But Mooney has learned the art of patience over the years.
His role in the development of the converter started way back in the 1960s, when he first became an employee with Englehard Corporation.
“We first put the converters on forklift trucks, because they ran on propane, and initially the converters would not work with leaded gas,” he recalled.
California led the way in cleaning up car pollution, and eventually the converter became a standard feature of all gasoline-powered vehicles in the U.S.
“There was a theory that efficiency would suffer,” Mooney remembered. “There were full-page ads at the time saying this would be a $20 billion mistake. And yet the very first year we proved that you could get 28 percent better fuel economy. And car engines last 50 percent longer.”
Today he sees the same sort of opposition to converters in other countries.
“[Europe] used to drive me crazy,” he said. “One of the troubles was that environmental groups had to report to the Ministry of Transport or something like that.”
As a result, bureaucracy and inertia slowed the adoption of converters.
Nothing has slowed Mooney, who still works a full week at Engelhard and his other projects. Thursday’s outing to the White House will mean a day off from work. His wife, Claire, and their five children will accompany him.
President Bush has been criticized for his relaxed policy on pollution, but Mooney demurred when asked if he would tackle him about it.
“I would like to talk to him about that,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ll have the chance.”
And, next time someone makes a joke about New Jersey and pollution, tell them about John Mooney. It could have been an awful lot worse.

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