For more than a decade, Mexico City residents have lived under the illusion that the city’s air pollution has been brought under control. But all that changed suddenly this spring when the city’s environment authority imposed strict new measures, declaring a series of pollution emergencies that limited driving and factory production. The alerts shook the city’s complacency. In part, they marked a simple truth: that the city’s residents had long been breathing air whose quality was not being improved in step with tighter standards. The emergencies also acted as a warning to speed up measures that had languished for years, sapped of any urgency by the early success of the city’s anti-pollution actions. Those rules—implemented in the early 1990s—shut down many factories... [Log in to read more]