Huh, no. Pollution close to humans is bad for both city and rural people.
> The pollution always goes somewhere,
"The solution to pollution is dilution". We want the concentration of pollution low, so the health effects are low too, and we can give natural processes the time to decay/oxidize/etc the pollutants.
> not like we have large swaths of useless places
We do... we mostly care about the lower ~100 meters of atmosphere because that's where people live. That's less than 1% of the total atmosphere. This means we can distribute pollution over a volume a 100x larger than that that is important for us. And then I'm not even counting the vast amount of the planet that's uninhabited / non-land.
Also, smokestacks are designed to not directly pollute the air close to people, see:
> The pollution always goes somewhere,
"The solution to pollution is dilution". We want the concentration of pollution low, so the health effects are low too, and we can give natural processes the time to decay/oxidize/etc the pollutants.
> not like we have large swaths of useless places
We do... we mostly care about the lower ~100 meters of atmosphere because that's where people live. That's less than 1% of the total atmosphere. This means we can distribute pollution over a volume a 100x larger than that that is important for us. And then I'm not even counting the vast amount of the planet that's uninhabited / non-land.
Also, smokestacks are designed to not directly pollute the air close to people, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnYdt4T76mk