Many Asians are slowly beginning to realize that the Western industrial strategy, with its heavy use of raw materials and energy, is a highly toxic model. The West has been able to reduce its pollution and make its cities livable only because of the enormous investments it has made in pollution control and prevention since the 1960s. Moreover, the West has had a relatively stable population base. But with hundreds of millions of poor people aspiring to live like Westerners, most Asian countries want to adopt the Western model on the cheap, and in the process they may cook their own goose.

A fine example is demand for transportation in India. In the U.S., there is one car for every 1.6 people. If India were to have the same ratio, the number of cars in the country would have to grow from 3 million to more than 550 million. That's not likely to happen, but it's entirely possible that in two decades Indians will be riding on hundreds of millions of motor scooters that burn a mix of gasoline and oil and are less friendly to the environment than regular autos. These scooters account for 70% of the motor vehicles registered in India as of 1993, and most Asian cities are packed with similar smogmakers. If investments in highway and traffic infrastructure and smog-control technology lag behind, one can imagine widespread mayhem and pollution on the roads of the kind already seen in big cities from Bangkok to Delhi.