The Wild East / editorial

Real-time Taiwan air-quality readings here

Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past. The same also applies to current air pollution standards in Taiwan.

A fuss should be made about the obscenely high “acceptable limit for particulates — a cooked-up formula that says 35 is OK when the U.S. for example limits it to 12. And then the government further cooks it so it’s “moderate” up to 100!

Air pollution literally kills people. So health officials should be held accountable at every opportunity, and questioned whether they’re serious about noncommunicable disease when the same government simply pimps for industrial interests at the cost of 30+% of that burden of disease (more for cancers, of course, but we’re talking heart disease, too).

The afflicted are choking from it right now… The hospital can open up asthmatic lungs for more of this bad air, but that lasts less than 5 hours. Then what?

Nov 16 – More bullshit government air quality readings — on a day that there’s visible haze across a narrow street, the official air map says we’re still doing fine. But the independent readings are still nudging three and four times as high!

What’s the reason for this discrepancy?
The quotes from Forumosa in original post talk about different air quality guidelines. It doesn’t take an expert to know that today’s air is dangerous — I’m personally choking and losing my voice. But the government doesn’t want to stop building power plants and plastics factories. So according to the Forumosa post it sets a limit of 35 where the US and other countries allow only 12. Today it says conditions are “moderate” when the levels are spiking toward 100 officially and toward 200 by the independent monitors.

And just like on Sunday, as things get bad, the “real-time” report goes away…
An official who used to be at EPA said that once the current administration came in, all efforts to tighten air pollution standards went out.

The incoming administration virtually neutered the agency, commented one noted environmentalist on this situation.

It’s gotten worse — all stations are in the red now (but not, of course, on the government readings). Here are the excuses for a 23-day delay in manual readings: <

Nov 25 – Yesterday there was nice weather, but the air quality readings were still red from these independent sites. In this respect, one of our few options is to follow the example of Beijing’s expats: get an air cleaner and you can protect yourself from up to 90% of the crud — at least for a third of your life.