You said “pollution” should be banned. That includes a whole lot more than soot. And no, you can’t recapture “all” of the soot from a smokestack. Filtering particulates out of flue-gas stacks is a whole field of engineering. And that’s just one source. PM2.5 is produced by a huge variety of human activity: https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/sources-air-pollution-most-i.... The dominant source is actually residential wood burning.
> If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).
I focused on environmental policy in law school. It is absolutely about informed trade-offs, within an economic framework. Equity is one part of policy, but the field is not “mostly” about that. Of course that aspect of it gets a lot of press, because it makes for easy narratives for liberal arts major journalists who have trouble with science and economics.
Uh, you can absolutely be pollution neutral. You can be carbon neutral, and I don't buy for one microsecond that there are 0 technologies that could filter soot from smokestacks. In fact, we could recapture all of it.
If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).
Some reading: https://www.ehn.org/dupont-c8-parkersburg-2644262065.html