Is Taiwan still the land of opportunities?

That’s a key point gain. Taiwan is a mountain. so much of our pollution blows away and/or washes down and out with our strong rains. Korea is very much different. A few friends from Korea visited us a few weeks ago and we apologized for the dirty air (we were staying in Kaohsiung and pintung), They commenting how clean the air was here. After some.long discussion they felt Korea was generally far worse than south west Taiwan despite that area being Taiwan’s worst.

That said, as the saying goes: 2 wrongs don’t make a right. Taiwan is terrible, and we shouldn’t use our lucky geography and weather patterns that lighten our load somehow justify our neglect and responsibilities. Everyone should know Beijing is worse, Seoul is worse, Mexico city is worse. Perhaps the big issue is that they don’t care to think why they are worse and how some heavy polluting regions, such as north Pingtung through tainan, get a pass cause people tend.to just read into population numbers, factory count, pm xyz and political bias. Let the factory output and local hospital cases show the real truth. Its quite sad.

That is so wrong. You clearly don’t have any meteorological knowledge. Mountains make air pollution worse, especially in basins (Taipei and Taichung). One of the reasons why air pollution always aggravates in winter down south is because when the wind blows from the East it’s completely blocked by the mountain chain. One of the reasons the Netherlands doesn’t have a lot of air pollution (comparatively-speaking, in Europe it’s amongst the bad ones) despite the population density being very high and high coal power generation (highest in Western Europe; Belgium and the Netherlands are the least green countries in Europe) is because it’s completely flat so all the particles are blown away by the wind. Also, it rains even more there.

Lol I guess Korea needs to get a grip.

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Yes that’s true, mountains create pockets of pollution, temperature etc. That’s why south of that little range between Kaohsiung and tainan we get that kind of tropical temperature for more tropical fruits and trees. Probably also why chayi gets the short end of the stick with all of taijongs pollution.

My wording was wrong, I mean Taiwan is essentially a narrow single mountain range that is mostly too extreme to allow heavy industrialization. There are relatively few water catchment areas and we are an island with a very narrow section of industrialized land between mountains and sea. So leeching and soil erosion allows for little accumulation of things (relative to how much pollution and contaminatio we create) as we are essentially washed right out to sea. I understand we have some basins that catch pollution, but this is virtually nothing in comparison to a larger country that’s not coastal. We just left taijong, man that was scary bad!

But if one is to believe the air pollution readings for Taiwan, generally its not the mountains edge that’s the worst, though I lived there for over a.decade and agree with you first hand each valley is different and unique, so it gets bad there but not often recorded. Kaohsiung and that area is terrible, its.coastal and the pollution mostly washes and blows away. Our N/S orientation with winter winds helps us out a lot too! So with that in mind, and that spot already being so bad, imagine just how much pollution is created. Our lucky geography and weather gets rid of much of our pollution already. If we were inland without our winds, rains and generally ease and speed of mountain peak to ocean, we might just be like Beijing…