Rethinking Air Pollution After the Virus

Some of the most powerful images that circulated around the world as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns were of the unsullied blue skies.

The pandemic that’s so far killed more than 350,000 people worldwide catalyzed calls to make cleaner air a permanent condition, and as the death toll from Covid-19 mounted around the world, studies in Germany, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. stoked public concern that the damage to health from poor air had made the pandemic worse. What had formerly been mostly a debate about the long-term effect of emissions on climate change suddenly became an immediate matter of life and death.