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Soaring gas prices have beneficial effect on air

Rising fuel prices may have contributed positively to the environment, as air quality readings this summer show pollution to be at a five-year low, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday.

“This year’s percentage of summer days with bad air quality is about half of that of the past five summers,” EPA director-general of environmental monitoring and information management Chu Yu-chi (朱雨其) said at a press conference.

Because of southern breezes coming from the ocean, Taiwan’s summers typically have the best air quality of the year, Chu said.

Chu said that while the past few summers had bad air quality 3 percent of the time, this year the rate had dropped to 1.6 percent.

“We have hypothesized that there are three main reasons the air is good this summer — heavier rainfall, less impact on the atmosphere induced by typhoons, and less air pollutants from traffic,” Chu said.

While the number of days this summer that had heavy and torrential rain stood at 144 days and 50 days, respectively, the number was as low as 34 days and two days in the past, he said.

In addition, a large contributor to bad air quality in the past was the impact from the outer radius of typhoons or tropical storms, Chu said.

“However, though this year Taiwan suffered from typhoons Kalmaegi and Fung-wong, they did not affect the air quality much,” Chue said.

But beyond forces of nature, the good air quality this summer may have also been caused by human factors, Chu said.

“From data we gathered from the Bureau of Energy as well as the media, we concluded that the cleanliness of the air was related to fewer people driving, a result of higher gas prices,” Chu said.

“For example, traffic flow on national freeways this June dropped by 8 percent compared with the same period last year,” he said.
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