Foreign Correspondents as They Live and Breathe
That came as a shock." For Ellen Barry, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief, who is based in New Delhi, the smog’s arrival is "a true disaster." "When you land at the airport
and they open the hatch on the aircraft," she says, "the smell hits you like a wall while you’re still in your seat.
So when the conversation over a recent lunch in The Times’s Beijing bureau turned to the air pollution
that regularly suffuses this city with chemicals and despondency, Ian Johnson, a China correspondent, took out his phone to check Air Matters, an app that measures air quality based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index, which scores the air from 0 to 500.
Dirty air contributes to the deaths of millions of people each year, according to a recent Health Effects Institute report, "State
of Global Air." Katrin Bennhold, a Times correspondent in London, cycles daily through smoggy parts of the city to reach work.
"Even those colleagues who go to great lengths to protect the lungs of their children find it can be difficult to keep the effects
of the smog at bay," says Edward Wong, a former Beijing bureau chief who returned to the United States late last year.
If carried through, the order — which lifts American limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, the largest contributor
of particulate pollution — flies in the face of the United States’ pledge under the Paris climate accord to cut its emissions.
In this article, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a Beijing-based Times correspondent, compares notes
and guilt trips with Times reporters around the world who have moved with their families to smog-laden news hubs.
