Comment by FirmwareBurner

>We can look at China that is focused on growth at all costs.

It's easy to look down on others from an ivory tower in the wealthy developed west, but consider that China was dirt poor a few decades ago. What else would you have chosen? Die of poverty while protecting the environment? Same with India. They did what they had to in order to survive.

The west did that too in the industrial revolution. China had to speed run decades of industrial evolution in years. So why gaslight other countries for doing the same thing your country did a few decades earlier?

The good news for them is China recently stopped extracting rare earths on the cheap for the west. Their cities, air, water are waaay cleaner than they were just a decade ago. Chinese cities are actually livable now.

That's why the west is scrambling to find alternative sources on the cheap in other places that will let their environment be trashed, like Ukraine and Africa, since China doesn't want to be the west's easily exploitable environmental pay-piggy anymore, and good for them.

The bad news for the planet is that environmental destruction is not stopping, it's just moving away from China to other poorer places with weaker economies and militaries who are more malleable to western pressure and corporate demands.

>China would bulldoze my hometown in 2 seconds if it meant an addition 0.1 GDP.

Your western nation most likely did the same from the industrial revolution till WW2.