Gee... I wonder why they have those strict laws in place, Hortlund?
Could it be because they totally screwed up the environment before they had them in place?
You know, the kind of problems only "moronic 3rd World countries with a complete disregard for the environment" would have: like acid rain, smog, nuclear fallout, oil spills etc. etc.
But I suppose you'll argue that unlike these current ones, those problems never spread over the world, so we didn't "all have to pay for them". Sure, there's no data to support that theory because no one in the West cared about pollution at all then.
Asia for the most part is too damn poor to care about pollution yet, which is eerily like the West used to be.
And unfortunately, unlike the West, the 3rd World doesn't have a 3rd World to move all the really nasty polluting industries to.