I wish people understood something about environment concerns, the action of using cleaner methods is a 'cost', and this cost is only worth paying when the people behind it are willing to pay the cost.
These countries aren't dirty because they don't have an EPA, they are dirty because they are making their lives better and for the time being they don't care about spending huge cost on keeping things clean.
Consider it to be like writing tests for your code. Writing tests for your code is a cost and not every team is willing to pay it, even though they should. If govt creates a National Testing Agency in 1987 which forced teams to have certain code coverage and tests then it would have faced major opposition from most people. In 2007 even fewer teams wrote tests, and in 1997 very few teams wrote tests. Similarly in 2027 testing standards would be a lot bigger norm where the presumption would be that every component is fully covered and tested.
When West had its industrial revolution it was pretty dirty, but it was acceptable to most people because their standards of living were going up exponentially high. Sooner or later after reaching a plateau of progress, they realized that at this point they don't care about increase in standards of living via goods as much as they care about other things like cleaner environment etc.
People in India and China currently don't care so much about environment because of the magnitudes of progress they are seeing. Soon enough they will start valuing cleaner air and water.