We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"

In our neighborhood and pretty much anywhere here in Dhaka, you are passing at some point people burning garbage in the street. If you want to talk about air pollution, nothing will mess up the quality of the air like trash smoke.

Bangladeshis define the November to February as winter.  When we arrived here in January night time temperatures were "plummeting" to around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 C).  Everybody outside of the building was wearing parkas and scarves. Hailing from Michigan, we could hardly help not to laugh.

However, this "brutal" cold temperatures mean that throughout Dhaka there were street fires burning throughout the night, as people tried to stay warm.  Yes, in the poshest area of town we have a little family living right on our corner. And every morning now when I walk past on my way to work, they have a little fire going: leaves, trash, whatever.  The air in the neighborhood is thick with smoke.

A lot of times, Dhaka is covered with a blanket of white fog, or is it fog?  Between the cars, the brick factories all around, the fires, it is pretty polluted here. Maybe it is not the worst, like I heard about that can hardly function under their toxic clouds, such as China. But still, it is the worst I have ever experienced.

In the global discussion over global warming, the US gets dinged most of times. We do and have produced most of the carbon emissions after all. But,  US factories are clean and traffic is controlled, cars have emission standards, people don’t burn random stuff on the street. I know, I know, it is an unfair to compare as it took the US a long time to clean up its act. But burning the trash out in the street? I am sure Bangladesh has more immediate concerns than cutting back on carbon emissions, like how to feed their own people first. 

However, respiratory ailments here are a huge problem and one that we have been all experienced first hand! And it only took us a day to get rid of the Dhaka cough when we traveled to Thailand. But after all, like Lee Iacocca, the savior of Chrysler once said:

"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"