alt Hacker NewsIt depends what you're burning and how you burn it.
If you're burning gas, you're burning it either at the perfect fuel/air ratio or maybe just a little lean. You only get water vapour and carbon dioxide out.
If you're piling up coal in a stove you're getting all sorts of crap out of the chimney, including radioactive dust.
It's one of the reasons that cars have been fitted with catastrophic converters. These remove the CO and HC by reacting it with what little excess oxygen there is in the exhaust stream to turn it into carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time produce massive amounts of nitrogen oxides. It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses.
We'd have incredibly clean cities if we ran vehicles on propane instead of petrol, and in the UK there was a big push to do this about 25-30 years ago. Obviously this got a lot of pushback from the banks and car manufacturers, because it wasn't selling people enough debt. Don't adapt your existing car to run on clean fuel that's mostly burnt as production waste! Sell your dirty polluting petrol car that only gets 38MPG and buy this nice new Cleaner Greener Diesel that gets an incredible 39MPG! And all at only 14.7% APR!
Profit before the environment, as always.
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Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer.
Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.
I know developed countries have a very different understanding of the word "clean", but in my city -- which is stuck in the 18th century -- the difference between winter and summer months is extreme. 500-1000 µg/m³ of PM2.5 in winter is the usual deal. 1500-2000 µg/m³ are not unheard of. Yet in summer it's often only 5-10 µg/m³, with spikes of no more than 50 µg/m³ in the evenings due to -- again -- coal burning.
And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US.
Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.