Quote Originally Posted by Shattered Dreamer View Post
Discord cheers for the slap across the head. But the modern United States still have not polluted the world quite as much as the old British Empire did.
Even if that's true it's not the point. The U.S. is one of, if not the worst polluter of every first world nation on Earth. On top of that, when the Britain started the industrial revolution, you didn't have every single country and their pet dog strip mining the planet for every natural resource they could get their hands on in an attempt to do the same thing. With all the countries out there destroying their local eco-systems with no care for the consequences it falls on first world nations in particular to not only curb our own polluting, but to make the technologies that will help solve the problem available to other countries. No amount of burying our heads in the sand is going to get around the fact that we need to do something to lessen our impact on the environment, because we're all going to have to live with the consequences in the next few decades.

And the argument that all of this change will be hard on the economy is crap. The development and sale of new products and technologies can only help create more jobs and new business opportunities/industries. The transition might be tough, but it's not like the global economy would come crashing down leaving us all bankrupt.