The staff of the State Department was surprised this week by a Department Directive which asked the embassies and consulates to stop publishing air quality monitoring data.
CBS News examined the message sent to the staff on March 4, which indicates “currently there is no scheduled date for real -time data to be available”. The staff of the embassy and their families counted on reports to alert them to poor air quality days.
“I was shocked by the announcement,” said a member of the current staff, who asked to remain anonymous due to concerns about their work, and who declared that the decision did not make much sense, because the existing infrastructure to monitor air quality is already in place and operational. “I do not see any objective to deactivate this data, it makes no sense,” said another employee of the department.
A spokesperson for the State Department declared to CBS News in a press release that air quality monitors work, but the effort to transmit data on air pollution of embassies and consulates no longer occurs “due to funding constraints that prompted the ministry to extinguish the underlying network”. When asked what was costing to use the program, the State Department did not provide an answer.
“The cost to maintain these systems is trivial,” said Rick Duke, who was sent to the Deputy State Deputy Department until January and believes that it is not a question of saving as much money as it is motivated by Anti- Anti-climate Ideology in the Trump administration. “These monitors do not even concern the climate,” said Duke, “why remove information on the health of the Embassy and the Public staff?”
Air monitoring at American embassies began informally in 2008 when only one instructor was placed at the Beijing Embassy in China. The results were published every hour on Twitter, informing the public on air pollution levels in the city. The story called Airbeijing became famous on the Internet in 2010 when he tweeted that air on November 11 was “crazy” when the machine registered dangerously raised in levels of levels of levels air pollution.
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The purpose of surveillance was to inform American citizens living in the city’s air region, but the Chinese public quickly picked up the information and began to demand from their government the toxic pollution that local officials have often minimized.
The State Department has widened air monitoring in other embassies in the world ALLOW.GOV. A 2022 Scientific study have found that the embassy program has managed to reduce air pollutants “, which led to a substantial decrease in the risk of premature mortality confronted with more than 300 million people living in cities that house a monitor of the United States Embassy.”
But now that the program is over, the Web page for the embassy data Produced only an error message. THE The latest reading available in Beijing was published on March 4The day the agency has stopped transmitting data.
Current State Department staff have told CBS News that access to air quality data is essential when it weighed assignments abroad, in particular for those who have to move their whole family and children in unhealthy places, or in places where air surveillance by local governments is not reliable or non -existent.
“Steering employees with the information they need for their children’s health decisions are immoral,” said a member of the current staff, who spoke under the guise of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
A spokesperson for the State Department declared to CBS News in a press release that air data continues to be collected and “will be available when there is a secure and reliable means of transmitting it”. They said that the ministry “assesses other transmission options”.
The spokesperson also said that air quality monitoring equipment “is only one of the many tools that the ministry uses to ensure the health and safety of our staff.”
When CBS News questioned employees of other tools, they said they were aware of it and did not know how to access information.
