A few centuries ago, western European, especially British, inventors and entrepreneurs began employing what became “industrial” methods of producing goods. Before then, everything as made by hand. Artisans made only a few, high-quality items because it was so time-consuming to practice their craft (even with lots of indentured apprentices to do the grunt-work). Everybody else made their own tools and items, as best they could. The production of literally everything was “cottage industry” - slow and widely varying in quality. Then, the industrial revolution changed all that.

Some very smart people developed ways to mass-produce items that had previously been hand-made one-off items. A big early step was the power-loom. It allowed cloth to be woven in enormous quantities, cheaply, efficiently, with repeatable quality. There was a lot of argument about it putting cottage-industry weavers out of their livelihoods, but the practicality of the whole notion eventually won the day. Ordinary people could afford to own fine cloth. That was a big deal. It wasn’t long before the industry began to run up against the limitations of water wheels and the other available sources of power to operate those big looms.

When a guy named James Watt developed the steam engine, the industrial revolution took off. It was quick in historical terms, but it still took generations of human lives for industrial processes to be developed. It was the first time that we humans had ever done this stuff, so mistakes were made. Among other things, we either failed to see, or just ignored some of the consequences of big industry.  Sure it meant amazing leaps in prosperity, raising all boats - even the poorest people in industrial societies began to be better off than the ordinary people of non-industrial societies. But that progress also brought costs. It didn’t take long for the skies to darken and the waters to become polluted with more than just our bodily wastes.

Once we began, as western societies, to see these consequences as problems, we began to address them. To be sure, there was some dragging of feet, some denial, but eventually we got behind the notion that industry, while an undeniable benefit was also in need of some drastic cleanup. Over decades, we began to favor cleaner ways of making the things that permitted our cushy lifestyles. Manufacturers began to cut back on consumption of resources, to recycle, to minimize or eliminate effluent. To some extent, we began to recognize that what was effluent of one factory could be raw material for another factory, that “waste” heat could be used to generate electricity, or reclaimed to pre-heat input material that would otherwise need more energy to bring to working temperatures. All kinds of economies and clean methods were discovered and implemented. Our skies began to clear and our lakes began to sparkle again.

But then, previously pre-industrial nations like China, India, and several others began to pursue the benefits of industry and mass production of goods. Not only could they sell to us, they could begin to sell the products of their new industry to their own people as those people’s standard of living began to rise.
I wish to quash the poorly considered and wrong-headed view that developing nations such as China, India and others are somehow owed a chance to “catch up” with western living standards by means of polluting, environment-raping industrial methods. It’s simply a false equivalence that hurts everyone - us and them.

What China and those other countries ARE entitled to do is what England, Europe, and North America did in the first industrial age. That is, they took the state of science, technology and manufacturing as it existed at the time, and pushed it forward, improving it until all their citizens enjoyed vastly improved prospects and standards of living.

The parallel is that China, India, and all the other developing industrial economies are now entitled to take the state of science, technology and manufacturing as they find it now - the time when those countries are commencing their industrialization - and push it forward.
It would be the height of folly and cultural laziness for them to instead look back more than a century and embrace a wasteful, inefficient, polluting 19th-century industrial model, and the height of folly for us to permit it.

We westerners were merely the first, so we had to learn. There was no one to teach us, no one who had done it before us. We had to come into our now-global understanding of the consequences of the early methods.
We now know to put scrubbers on our smokestacks, filters and separators on our effluent pipes, reclaimers on our heat output, and so on. We now know to recycle and resell our chemicals, to use our factory heat to heat homes, schools and hospitals, or to generate electricity. If China, India and others wish to pretend to do what 19th-century westerners did, then they must do the hard work of using the technology that’s known today and pushing it to new frontiers. There is no moral right of a free ride for “new” polluters. We, and they, know the difference.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2008