China maybe ahead of historic trends in prioritizing
clean air and environmental cleanup: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-20/how-china-beats-the-u-s-at-clean-air-progress
Economist Tyler Cowen notes:
“To help predict
when countries will start a successful fight against air pollution, economists
have developed a metric known as the environmental Kuznets Curve. This curve
shows that societies create more pollution as they move from poverty to wealth,
but at some point they become so wealthy that they clean up the environment and
then pollution declines. Well-off people don’t like breathing bad air and will
sacrifice some economic growth for better surroundings.”