Global Courant
In East Asia, years of chronic air pollution are one reason face mask wearing was common long before the coronavirus pandemic. School children there are used to playing indoors on bad air days. In Korean, bad air has a specific term – particulate matter – and its levels are displayed in real time in places such as train stations, bus stops and elevators.
“I know particulate matter is a problem, and I don’t think about it anymore,” said Lee Hyung-ko, a university student from Seoul, the capital of South Korea. “It’s not going away anytime soon, so we’ll just have to live with it.”
Air pollution can also weigh heavily on politics. In South Korea, aspiring presidents have made reducing air pollution part of their campaign platforms. In China, the smog over Beijing and other cities has been seen over the years as a failure of leadership. And smoke that occasionally blows from forest and peat fires in Indonesia to other parts of Southeast Asia tends to infuriate neighboring governments.
Sometimes political pressure over bad air leads to tangible changes. Beginning in the late 1980s, when Mexico City came under international criticism for its poor air, the city and the nearby state government took a series of measures, such as limiting the number of days cars could circulate per week and closing an urban refinery. The reforms largely worked: the air in the city improved dramatically.
In other cases, the city air has been improved by something no one saw coming. In Bangkok, as for example in New Delhi and other cities, the air in the city of 11 million people improved noticeably during the coronavirus pandemic, said Mr. Paiboon, the taxi driver, who has been driving a taxi for 18 years.
Now it’s back to normal.
“If you drive onto the turnpike early in the morning, you can see it’s all hazy,” he said. “It looks like fog, but it’s not. They are all dust particles.”
