Wasn't there some magical thinking about how by outsourcing industries to those poor countries will bring them money and raise their standard of living to a point where they care just as much about their environment as us and it will all eventually equalize. Didn't quite pan out like that, did it.

Actually it did pan out. You just weren't paying attention.

Chinese cities had terrible air quality 20 years ago. Now they don't.

The Chinese and Indian governments have climate change plans that they're actively working on, sometimes ahead of schedule. The current US government has banned the words "climate change" in official documents.

They are not quite there yet. China now has a huge middle class, but they also still have a massive underclass. It’s too early to claim these projections were wrong. I think they are misguided, but there is no denying that China now pays more attention to pollution than it did a decade or two ago. There are massive investments to clean the air in large cities. Same in India: the situation is dire but the political cost of supporting the status quo keeps increasing.

China

China deploys more solar and wind power then the US.

Americans seem to love to count their past successes and then declare the game is over and they won.

History doesn't end though.