If pollution is your focus but not global warming, then you'll focus more on scrubbing technologies and better combustion and the like. A lot of stuff can burn extremely cleanly now if you ignore CO2, and the only reading to look at CO2 is climate change. It's not important at all as a pollutant otherwise.
I also doubt that people would be unified on pollution if not for global warming. In my experience, the people who doubt climate change also downplay pollution in general. It's largely the same people saying global warming is a liberal hoax, and complaining about how the government says they can't dump used motor oil down the storm drains, can't buy freon anymore, cars have to come with catalytic converters, and such.
I disagree. Switching the conversation back to pollution will have the same end result as focusing solely on climate change.
Yes, a focus on pollution will result in cleaner dirty energy, but cleaner dirty energy is better than dirty dirty energy. Clean dirty energy is probably more likely to have lower CO2 emissions.
Climate change deniers may try to deny pollution, but pollution is a lot harder to explain away. Pollution happens in your face today (see China), but climate change happens 100 years away in extrapolated data models. You can explain over fishing destroying jobs instead of ecosystems. Or explain over-logging creating soil erosion that destroys homes.
People understand problems that affect people today, not ecosystems tomorrow.
Coal is probably a lost cause for plain pollution, but stuff like natural gas and petroleum should be burnable pretty much arbitrarily cleanly if you put in the effort. They're already extremely clean in the context of power plants.
The ideal combustion cycle with a hydrocarbon produces pure carbon dioxide and water. You'll never get all the way there, but you can approach it pretty closely. A world concerned only with pollution would likely converge on a lot of natural gas power plants and clean-burning oil-powered cars. A world concerned with climate change would converge on nuclear, solar, wind, and such.
Don't underestimate people's ability to deny the effects of pollution, too. Go look at the comments in the recent thread about Beijing's smog alert. There are a ton of people in there calling into doubt the health effects of chronic high-concentration particulate pollution, even from people who have experienced it first-hand, and this is the sort of stuff that makes your eyes and nose burn with a few minutes' exposure.
Lots of pollution is silent and long-term, too. Smog is very visible, but how about long-term contamination of groundwater or the oceans?
All in all, I just don't see much difference in membership in the set of climate change deniers and the set of people who think pollution controls are a bad idea.
I also doubt that people would be unified on pollution if not for global warming. In my experience, the people who doubt climate change also downplay pollution in general. It's largely the same people saying global warming is a liberal hoax, and complaining about how the government says they can't dump used motor oil down the storm drains, can't buy freon anymore, cars have to come with catalytic converters, and such.