Agreed. Vox isn't in the news business, they're in the selling ads through confirmation bias business.
To solve particulate pollution in a practical way we don't need to build wind turbines to replace gas plants (that would be good for CO2 reasons though), we need to slap filters on diesel garbage trucks and heavy industry exhaust stacks and wet down construction sites and do other things to keep small dust (which invariably gets into people's lungs, reacts with various organic molecules and causes problems) to a minimum.
Straw manning particulate pollution as a fossil fuel problem is a great way to make particulate pollution seem like a bigger and harder to solve problem than it actually is.
Of course that would be better but that's a hard and expensive problem and the 99% solution is easy and cheap. Seems like a pretty obvious choice to me.
>California with some of the strictest tailpipe emission standards still has huge smog problems.
A combination of bad geographic luck and diminishing returns (everyone else's emissions regulations have 90+% the same effect)
>I don't see the issue with highlighting the air quality co-benefits of fighting climate change.
If your goal is to stop coughing up a lung today then focusing on better batteries and cheaper green energy is wasted effort when you can directly solve the pollution problem more cheaply right now. Sure air quality is a nice side benefit to reducing C02 emissions but if your true goal is improved air quality then reducing CO2 emissions is a crap way to go about it because the two are only loosely correlated and the bang for your buck is so bad. If your goal is to win eyeballs to your site and get people who's understanding of the problems is on the level checkout-isle magazine to share your article then it is probably a good idea.
The big problem is prevalence of old cars or ones in disrepair.
Then of course coal and oil plants, secondary gas plants; and of course industrial pollution from manufacturing.