There's probably little difference, but I'm not sure if that's a legitimate excuse. Is a heavily polluting industrial phase necessary for countries to become de

There's probably little difference, but I'm not sure if that's a legitimate excuse. Is a heavily polluting industrial phase necessary for countries to become developed? I'm not sure if that's true or not; maybe it is and it's acceptable for developing countries to make the same environmental missteps as developed nations had in order to progress to the same levels of development. I would hope, though, that with technological advances there would be a greater ability to be industrial while mitigating some of the environmental issues that plagued the US and the UK during their industrial revolutions. I don't know if this is a valid analogy, but I sometimes think about what this argument would sound like if it was about something like slavery instead of environmental damage. There was much infrastructure and industry in parts of the US built on the backs of slaves, but I think that if there were modern-day countries with substantial slave industries, we wouldn't find it defensible to say that the US also had slaves too in the past and that developing countries should have a chance to do so as well as a temporary part of their development. Maybe pollution is a necessary evil for any society, and maybe it's not as bad as slavery. It just seems like placing each society on separate 'tracks' of development for them to go through the same troubles and dangers without criticism both demeans developing societies as "oh, they're just 100 years behind us" and also ignores the sort of "horizontal gene transfer" of technology and social/philosophical/political concepts that can accelerate developing countries' development.