Delhi Air Is Worse Than Beijing Air

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/02/01/delhi-air-worse-beijing-air/

By Zachary Shahan, February 1, 2014

One of the reasons running CleanTechnica has become a full-time job for me is because I love covering the fun and exciting developments in solar energy, the electric vehicle industry, and wind energy. However, I got into this arena because of a clear passion to help the world help itself. As a whole, we’re threatening our own society’s existence, as well as the existence of countless species, through the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. It’s crazy. One of the ways in which we are cutting our lives short in this process is through the tremendous air pollution that it creates. Beijing’s horrible air pollution has been the story as of late, but Delhi actually has it much worse!

Beijing has been getting a lot of attention for its crazy bad/deadly air. However, a reporter at the New York Times has noted that Delhi’s air is often even worse.

“Despite Beijing’s widespread reputation of having some of the most polluted air of any major city in the world, an examination of daily pollution figures collected from both cities suggests that New Delhi’s air is more laden with dangerous small particles of pollution, more often, than Beijing’s. Lately, a very bad air day in Beijing is about an average one in New Delhi.”

Yikes. Here’s more:

The United States Embassy in Beijing sent out warnings in mid-January, when a measure of harmful fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 went above 500, in the upper reaches of the measurement scale, for the first time this year. This refers to particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, which is believed to pose the greatest health risk because it penetrates deeply into lungs.

But for the first three weeks of this year, New Delhi’s average daily peak reading of fine particulate matter from Punjabi Bagh, a monitor whose readings are often below those of other city and independent monitors, was 473, more than twice as high as the average of 227 in Beijing. By the time pollution breached 500 in Beijing for the first time on the night of Jan. 15, Delhi had already had eight such days. Indeed, only once in three weeks did New Delhi’s daily peak value of fine particles fall below 300, a level more than 12 times the exposure limit recommended by the World Health Organization.

That’s sad, and scary.

For more on this story (it doesn’t get any prettier), check out the full New York Times piece.

One of the reasons running CleanTechnica has become a full-time job for me is because I love covering the fun and exciting developments in solar energy, the electric vehicle industry, and wind energy. However, I got into this arena because of a clear passion to help the world help itself. As a whole, we’re threatening our own society’s existence, as well as the existence of countless species, through the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. It’s crazy. One of the ways in which we are cutting our lives short in this process is through the tremendous air pollution that it creates. Beijing’s horrible air pollution has been the story as of late, but Delhi actually has it much worse!
Read more at http://cleantechnica.com/2014/02/01/delhi-air-worse-beijing-air/#AFsMgcYguESSMr6B.99