True. On the other hand, many of those past behaviors that we see as wrong for today were a big part of how we got to our present high standard of living. Doing those bad things was cheaper and faster than less bad methods.

If we are going to tell lower standard of living countries that they need to take the slower or more expensive routes to wealth instead of using the same bad ways we did, we should be using some of our wealth to subsidize those more expensive routes for them.