Taking Note: One Way to Handle Smog: Lower the Standards

On seven of the first nine days of December, the air quality in Shanghai was so poor that the city warned children and the elderly to stay indoors. Flights and sporting events were canceled and stores sold out of face masks. Photographs of smog obscuring the Shanghai skyline circulated on the Internet. The pollution was even visible from space.

Then last Thursday the Shanghai environmental protection bureau announced it would take action to reduce the number of warnings — not by lowering pollution levels, but by lowering safety standards.

Air quality is measured according to the concentration of particulate matter per cubic meter. The World Health Organization recommends not exceeding 25 micrograms. Shanghai used to set its benchmark for triggering alerts far above that, at 75 micrograms, and has now lifted that to 115 micrograms. Even under the laxer standard, Shanghai would have had to issue warnings: The air quality index was at 238 on Dec. 8 and reached a record 482 on Dec. 6 — or 19 times higher than the W.H.O. recommendation.

The environmental bureau's move was so cynical that even the state-owned China Daily called it "a reluctant tacit acknowledgment of the city's poor air quality." Naturally, the paper also voiced the official justification that "the original standard is too strict, given that haze is common in the Yangtze River Delta region in winter."

It makes no sense, or at least no good sense, to base alerts on what's usual rather than what's safe—but that's exactly what the bureau's doing. China Daily added that the city would likely "revert to the original standard to lift sever-pollution warnings in summer, when air quality is better."

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