It's an unfortunate coincidence: The developed world is finally coming to realize the destructive power of its heavily-industrialized economies just as the rest of the world is beginning its widespread adaptation of modern production methods.  

This time around, though, there are new catches for the would-be industrialist. We are now well aware that the world’s resources are finite, and knowledge abounds of the planet’s limited capacity to absorb industrial pollution, on both a local and global level. And there are already 150 years — roughly a century of them completely unregulated — of accumulated industrial damage to mitigate. 

Furthermore, as if the stakes needed to be any higher, the huge size of the populations involved in this upcoming wave of industrialization makes its potential environmental harm nearly limitless. 

So how best to moderate between the right to develop and the need to protect? The UN has already ruled that it’s unfair to make developing nations meet the stringent controls placed on current economic powerhouses. But to allow newly developing nations to make the same mistakes as their predecessors made would be catastrophic for the entire world. 

The currently proposed solution — in India, at least — seems to be a delicate tightrope walk between the two undesirable extremes. India, which currently produces only 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, plans to continue exploiting its inexpensive, heavily-polluting coal resource to meet the current 8-9% yearly growth of its economy.

The environmental check to this expansion will be to keep per capita warming emissions in line with already-developed nations. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh explains that "despite our development imperatives, our per capita [global warming] emissions will not exceed the per capita [global warming] emissions of the developed industrialized countries.” 

While India’s large population gives it plenty of leeway to pollute under this system, increasing prosperity will almost certainly bring about  a reduction in population growth, as well as increased public sphere capital, some of which will be fed into green energy projects slated to  meet an ever-increasing share of the nation’s energy needs.

While the compromise looks good on paper, and certainly has tremendous potential to succeed, simply undercutting the per capita global warming emissions of developed nations may not be a strict enough control.  Already, pollution is limiting crop yields in a nation that desperately needs food, and with the introduction of the Nano, an ultra-compact, ultra-affordable car in 2009, emissions could skyrocket before improved living conditions have a chance to curtail the ever-increasing population growth rate.

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Photo by Tawheed Manzoor