First of all, can we agree that pollution is not a simple liberal-conservative issue? Woody Guthrie used to sing folk songs about how glorious industrialization was. Monarchies used to lock up vast tracts of land as private hunting reserves.
Now.
Mgtman, I think you are neglecting the effects of what are sometimes called economic “bads”, to constrast them with “goods”. If you go to a third world country, you’ll find them awash in economic bads that overwhelm any attempt to increase the production of goods.
One obvious example is a lack of clear property rights. Hundreds of millions of people live, work on, or farm land which they have no formal right to, other than the fact that their ancestors lived, worked on, or farmed that land. Lack of property rights is a bad.
Another more obvious example is war. The Ethiopian famine of the 80s was NOT the result of crop failures. Sure there was a drought, but people would have survived the drought. All those people crowded into refugee camps and starved to death because if they had stayed on their land and farmed it their crops would have been confiscated by soldiers/bandits (same thing in the third world) at best, and tortured and murdered at worst.
Another example of an economic bad from the US is racism. Think of all the people who would have been brilliant doctors, engineers, lawyers, or teachers, but ended up as ditch-diggers or dishwashers because they were the wrong color. That isn’t just bad for the guy who ended up in a dead-end job, it is bad for everyone. And gender inequality is the same. How many seamstresses would have been great surgeons, if only they had been given an education and an opportunity. Although things have changed in the US and are still changing, the situation in most of the third world is still at 19th century levels.
We shouldn’t just focus on how the third world will require more economic goods to reach US levels. I imagine that eliminating economic bads is at least half–if not more than half–of the battle. And eliminating war, unjust legal systems, and racial and gender inequality consumes no natural resources and produces no pollution. Maybe that won’t bring people up to US levels of wealth, but perhaps they don’t need to be extravagantly wealthy to lead decent lives. And anyway, once they reach that point they can make their own decisions about how many goods and services their societies should produce, instead of us deciding for them.