why china?
This is a huge problem, we are so quick to tell others that they can not walk the same road to riches that we did (by polluting the environment with abandon).
But that's creating an artificial moat which will simply lengthen the period that non-affluent countries will remain that way. This serves us in all kinds of ways and is actually quite unfair.
I don't have a way out of this but I feel there is something quite wrong with telling a country that has some natural resource that they can't deplete it (after depleting our own natural resources) and telling a country that is polluting like mad that they shouldn't do that either (after we did that ourselves and have reaped the benefits of it).
Tough problems.
Firstly, the world didn't forge ahead with the industrial revolution in spite of the environmental costs. No one was initially aware of those costs. Now we are, and there's a push for everyone to change their tactics. I think it's fair that everyone has to change, but I acknowledge that it's a bit unfair that the west got to profit on those mistakes. But that's just life.
Developing nations now have real solid data on the environmental damage an industrial revolution will inflict not only on their part of the world, but the world as a whole. Is it fair to ask them to factor that new knowledge into their plans? Maybe it's not exactly fair, but it's a reasonable request I think.
But then what about a child born today? Is it fair for that child to grow up in a world where the air they will breath becomes more dangerous with each passing second, even though the adults of today know what they are doing and have it in their power to not do it? I think that's unfair.
And it's not like China's industrialisation has helped all Chinese. It's helped a few people. Is it fair that all citizens of Shanghai should suffer the health effects of the pollution generated as a result of 1 persons endeavour to maximise a profit? I don't see it.
This is not to say it's a black and white issue. Someone somewhere has to get a rough deal. This sadly is the world we've created for ourselves, and the rules we've decided to live by. It's not fair.
One is preserving the environment, often (global warming, ocean acidification, mercury pollution, acid rain, background radiation elevation, plastics pollution, ozone depletion, antibiotics overuse) in ways which affect the global environment and pose existential risks to all of modern civilization, if not humanity.
The other is equity and fairness.
Achieving a few years or decades of growth to lose it all really doesn't strike me as particularly rational behavior.
Addressing the whole scope of challenges facing the world is going to be exceptionally difficult.
We've developed technologies and equipment for extracting natural resources without the pollution we used to create; developing countries should skip ahead and make use of those same technologies. They're not exactly national secrets; I'd bet that our manufacturers who produce that equipment would be happy to fill overseas orders, and I doubt the US government would have a problem with it.
Ozone holes and CFC levels and ocean acidity and fish stocks and algal blooms and ground water levels and contamination and whatever else.
"We shouldn't tell them what to do" has a moral balance to it, but it doesn't create more unpolluted planet or undo the mess already made.
The bigger problem is that humans, as with all life, exists to exploit entropic gradients. Some of these are huge (e.g., the energy densities of hydrocarbons and fissible nuclear fuels), some are much more subtle, including the disruptions caused by introductions of modest amounts of novel contaminants into the environment. It's both our entropic sources and sinks which can be overwhelmed.
And economic growth which comes at a cost of the future to all isn't growth. It's a Ponzi scheme.