Liu, Qian. (2021, August 10). “Spatiotemporal Impacts of Covid-19 on Air Pollution in California, USA.” Science of The Total Environment, Elsevier. Retrieved August 14, 2020, from www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969720351214

    As the Covid-19 virus has been spreading throughout the world for the past two years, putting the world in lockdown, has had its impacts on our environment surrounding air quality and air pollution, in California specifically. In the start of the lockdown, we saw pollution rates steadily decrease, as major power plants were being shut down. From March 19-May 7, there was a “38%, 49%, and 31% drop in the concentration of NO2, carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) during the lockdown”. This shows the environmental benefits of the lockdown on California’s air quality and pollution, as our air quality numbers were the best they have been for the last five years in that given time.

    This article shed some light on the environmental benefits of the Covid-19 lockdown across our world, but more specifically in California. California had already been struggling with air quality before the lockdown, as wildfires began destroying our environment all across the state. On top of that, there are still major power plants across California that have obviously been negatively affecting our environment as well. So when we were put into lockdown, the power plants and everything causing our environment to decline, were all shut down causing a great turn around with our air quality and pollution. Unfortunately, as we have been getting out of lockdown and opening everything back up again, our air quality has gotten worse again. With this we can only hope that we are more mindful with our environment, as climate change is seeming to become humanity’s greatest issue.