You're just proving my point. You clearly have not had a real discussion with anyone who disagrees with your presumptions about the relative importance of emissions control. Your opponent is not a real person, it's a conservative stereotype (about a completely unrelated topic, no less).
They are bandaids with no guarantee of working and a lot of potential downsides with very dire consequences. It's still far easier and more effective to reduce carbon emissions.
As r0muald and nitrogen said, reducing pollution definitely is not something that "makes no difference at all". But...
The other problem is that "makes no difference at all" is a good outcome. A bad outcome is that we reduce carbon usage drastically, which reduces economic output drastically, which causes many deaths. (This is not hyperbole. Take China, for instance. They're polluting like crazy, but even with all the pollution, people are better off. They're moving to the cities to get out of rural poverty. That poverty shortens life spans more than the pollution does.)
The comment you replied to said 'mitigated', not 'solved'. Emissions controls already have, and still can, make enormous impacts on many consumer devices.
Given that emission controls are a whole lot easier to implement than eliminating a huge portion of the world's population, I'd say it's a more realistic goal to pursue.
It is likely to help, of course, but it's a happy accident and doesn't come close to making up for the amount of pollution, deaths, and money spent on this unnecessary structure.
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