I went to Beijing several years ago on business. By a total coincidence, it happened to be just after the Golden Week festival, which is a national holiday and businesses were closed. I expected quite a bit of smog, but when I arrived everything seemed clear. My Chinese host took me out to see the Great Wall, and it was breathtaking, and also crystal clear. I was wondering if the dirty air I had heard so much about was a myth.

But then the work week started, and as the week went on and the factories started up again, I noticed that the air was getting dirtier. My Chinese host took me to see the Forbidden City at the end of the week, which was also extremely beautiful, but already the air was so thick that I couldn’t see the landscape anymore, only the buildings in front of me.

Nature does a good job at cleaning the local air itself, but when we spew so much crap in it Nature can’t keep up. So, yeah, smog happens because of constant pollution.

Wind blows smog away and disperses it to where it isn’t noticeable, but sometimes the air gets polluted faster than the local winds can carry it away.

From Pittsburgh l, grew up across the river from a coke plant. If you’ve read an article on US Steel being sold recently it’s likely got stock footage from the plant.

But it never stops. These facilties run 24/7. In fact a lot of the ovens can break if they’re not running.

And then there’s the fact that the hills bottle things in (PGH sits at the base of the Appalachians). It gets really bad when there is a temperature inversion over the area.

It’s not as bad as it used to be though. Dad’s generation always talked of how the snow would be dirty after a few hours, which I don’t really see.

After 9/11 all flights were grounded for 3 days. Because there were no planes flying around over the US constantly for the first time in a long time they were able to observe insane drops in air pollution all across the US.

When the stay at home order kicked in at the start of COVID and practically every car in the US stopped driving around we noticed a similar drop in air particulate buildup in the air all across the nation.

The issue isn’t that the wind doesn’t blow it around and it eventually settles out of the sky into our drinking water or whatever. It’s always doing that. The problem is we are just also continuously producing the pollution.

I don’t think we need to go full dark ages and stop all planes and cars, but I do think it would be nice to work towards less planes and cars or at the very least less pollution producing vehicles. I think short range domestic flights should all be electric planes maybe they can figure out how to get solar panels all over the wings and battery tech will get to the point where one day they can fly across the oceans on battery as well.

Now it’s not all bad news. We have already gotten SO much better about these things in the past ~80 years alone. The smog in major cities back in the 50s was horrible.

Heres a snippet of this article: https://aqli.epic.uchicago.edu/news/the-origin-story-of-the-air-quality-index-and-the-toxic-smaze-that-came-before-it/#%3A~%3Atext=In+the+1950s%2C+a+toxic%2CDaily+News+Archive%2FGetty+Images]

“In the 1950s, a toxic shroud of pollution settled over New York City for six days as a shift in the weather trapped emissions from local coal power plants, factories, and cars. Some people called it “smaze,” a portmanteau of smoke and haze; the word smog hadn’t been fully popularized yet. After pollution levels spiked, dozens of people died. The same thing happened in 1963 and 1966.”