Foreign Correspondents as They Live and Breathe<br />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<br />and they open the hatch on the aircraft," she says, "the smell hits you like a wall while you’re still in your seat.<br />So when the conversation over a recent lunch in The Times’s Beijing bureau turned to the air pollution<br />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.<br />Dirty air contributes to the deaths of millions of people each year, according to a recent Health Effects Institute report, "State<br />of Global Air." Katrin Bennhold, a Times correspondent in London, cycles daily through smoggy parts of the city to reach work.<br />"Even those colleagues who go to great lengths to protect the lungs of their children find it can be difficult to keep the effects<br />of the smog at bay," says Edward Wong, a former Beijing bureau chief who returned to the United States late last year.<br />If carried through, the order — which lifts American limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, the largest contributor<br />of particulate pollution — flies in the face of the United States’ pledge under the Paris climate accord to cut its emissions.<br />In this article, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a Beijing-based Times correspondent, compares notes<br />and guilt trips with Times reporters around the world who have moved with their families to smog-laden news hubs.
