Also very dangerous particles go airborne from the use of brake pads. EVs (and hybrids) use mostly regenerative braking, and release almost no such pollution.

You make a good point about brake pads but EVs still release particles from tyre wear, although there is active research on tyres that reduce that source of pollution too.

It would be a bit much to expect them to not pollute at all, but if they pollute significantly less, that's still a major win.

CO2 emissions are of particular concern right now (and honestly should have been for the past 40 years), so it makes sense that they get a lot of attention. But you're absolutely right that it's not the only kind of pollution, and the others shouldn't be ignored either.

Despite there being 7 billion of us, we seem to struggle with paying attention to more than one problem at a time.

It's the ICE vehicle industry that's spreading this narrative. It's only a result of lobbying.

Gasoline burns very cleanly in modern (that is, <10 years) vehicles, with little to no emissions other than CO2, and most importantly, no particulate pollution. Particulate pollution is much worse for diesel vehicles, though.

Compared to those two, though, coal power plants are dirty as hell, and I’d take equivalent amount of car emissions to generate the same power over coal any day.

I code at a hospital, which is in a poor neighborhood. The garbage exhaust on my walk in to work from cheap old cars is unbelievable, to say nothing of 18 wheelers and huge trucks rolling through this poor neighboring neighborhood all day. Kids living there are straight up taking lung and brain damage from that exhaust. So it does grind my gears when people talk about coal EVs being dirtier, they just dont think of poor minority kids who bear the brunt of local city emissions of dirty ICE and diesel.

Also when it's cold outside the "clean" engines are really dirty as the catalytic converter do almost nothing at low temperatures.

"One of its biggest shortcomings is that it only works at a fairly high temperature. When you start your car cold, the catalytic converter does almost nothing to reduce the pollution in your exhaust." [1]

And when it's cold the car usually starts at someone home around where other people live and that's where the pollution ends up.

For diesel engines that operate at lower temperatures this is even worse.

[1] https://auto.howstuffworks.com/catalytic-converter3.htm

Trucks running dirty diesel aren’t really the same thing as a modern gasoline car.

Particulate pollution from highways and major roads is definitely a real issue and there have been studies done showing a lot of health problems result from living 250-500m or closer to such a road.

But if we’re talking about a modern emissions-compliant gas/petrol ICE vs a coal power plant I’m not sure how that shakes out. Coal power emissions are estimated to have massive health effects that affect millions as well.

(Of course, best solution is electric car powered by nat gas, nuclear, or renewables which don’t emit particulates at all...)

No, the same is true of coal plants. There are modern coal plants that burn much more cleanly than old coal plants.

Not that I want to argue in favour of coal plants; we still need to get rid of them just for the CO2. Same goes for ICEs.

Why can I smell those clean cars then?