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I don't think this is true. Can you elaborate on that?
The big CO2 producers in a modern economy (and even in a modern economy with significant heavy industry) are producing CO2 without adding much pollution otherwise. Gas turbines dump clean CO2 exhaust by design, and much of cement and chemical production also runs on natural gas. Coal plants have marched down the learning curve for 100 years, exhaust gas treatment is extensive and effective. The remaining steel mills still running blast furnaces instead of electric arc furnaces also already need to treat their exhaust.
The only semi-low hanging fruit I could think of is further cleaning up the diesels used in transport, construction and agriculture. But again, you can reduce pollution here a bit, but until batteries improve further, those processes will emit exactly as much CO2 as before you've reduced pollution.
And sure, we probably should flat-out ban two-strokes. But I doubt you'd even save 1% of global CO2, even if pollution in certain cities would improve noticeably. And objectively - both from a pollution an greenhouse gas perspective - we probably also should ban any and all large-scale livestock operations. But the effect on meat prices would be absurdly unpopular almost everywhere.
It will help. The more expensive you make bunker fuel/diesel/coal (and you make the companies producing them pay for storage of the mountains of sulfur for example) the more operators will look to other technologies or try to squeeze more productivity from the more expensive fuel. It will also put upward price pressure on lpg and natural gas where they can replace them. Look how li ion moved from exotic and expensive to disposable vapes in decade and a half. Free market is extremely capable of delivering solutions when someone puts the right problems.
Yeah, but those are all classic decarbonization measures, right? Yes, those work. But the premise was to use a pollution argument instead.
Unless you want to simply rename "decarbonization" into "reducing pollution" (and people will resist that, a gas turbine just doesn't produce enough black smoke or yellow water), this won't work. It's too easy to reduce visible pollution while keeping carbon emissions exactly the same.
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I'm normally supportive of the stance that capitalism+innovation converges to most efficient outcomes, but that is true only for local contexts. Bunker fuel is just burnt in international waters and the world collectively shrugs and says 'fuck the fish'. Economics is one thing but absolution of responsibility does exist. The only reason there isnt a floating migrant fleet of slave-labour factories is that efficient capital planning beats out deregulation.
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