For a few days late last month, “a cocktail of high atmospheric pressure, little wind and peak farming season emissions” left London with more-polluted air than Beijing, Bloomberg News reported. These worse-than-Beijing episodes are likely to occur more and more frequently — not because London’s air is getting worse, but because Beijing’s has gotten so much better.
The concentration of particles less than 2.5 micrometers in size, known as PM2.5, in the air over Beijing remains well higher on average than in London. The city’s air quality is also quite variable, with unfavorable weather conditions in winter and early spring still bringing episodes of terrible pollution. But huge ongoing differences in air quality between Beijing and the major cities of the developed world seem to have become a thing of the past, while other big cities in the developing world now dominate the pollution charts.
During its great economic rise in the 1990s and 2000s, China became what scientific journal The Lancet dubbed the “air pollution capital of the world.” Although the pollution was even worse in some of the country’s inland industrial cities, Beijing became a global byword for dirty skies.
The point of recounting all this is partly just to spread the word that Beijing’s air isn’t (usually) so dirty anymore. Much has been written about its improving air quality (including a column by me, way back in 2016), but it clearly hasn’t fully sunk in, given that “worse than Beijing” remains a go-to phrase for headline writers describing cities in the midst of pollution alerts. It’s time for an update. To be really, truly awful, your city’s air now has to be “worse than Delhi.”
Higher incomes don’t automatically bring cleaner air — Oman, Bahrain and Qatar are all pretty rich, yet the residents of their capitals have to put up with terrible pollution. It sure does seem to help, though: A recent World Health Organization update of global air pollution data found that only 17% of cities in high-income countries fell below its Air Quality Guidelines for PM2.5 or larger PM10 particle pollution, while in low- and middle-income countries 99% did. Rising out of poverty tends to entail huge increases in per-capita energy consumption and lots of pollution. But affluence brings slower growth in energy use and sometimes outright declines, as well as resources to combat the unwelcome side-effects. –Bloomberg
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