ABSTRACT
The industrial revolution had a marked impact on the environment from the outset. In industrializing societies themselves, factory centers were often blanketed with smoke. Ironically, the damage around factory centers proved easier to reverse than the environmental degradation of the more dependent economies—partly, of course, because there was more wealth available for addressing the problem. Nuclear wastes and accidents—such as the partial meltdown of a reactor in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and the earthquake and tsunami damage to Japanese plants in 2011—drew particular attention to the environmental hazards of advanced industrial societies. In the 1990s a series of international conferences vowed greater global collaboration to reduce industrial emissions. Several major countries, including Britain, became increasingly serious about environmental controls. But the whole effort was seriously jeopardized because the United States refused to sign the agreement, claiming it would hamper economic growth, but failing to come up with alternatives.
