But industrial waste is also a low-hanging fruit because as noted, the corporations can drive huge amounts of efficiency improvement and also derive financial benefit from doing so.

But that’s not the whole of the solution, for one simple reason: doing so drives down the price of products, which lets people buy more stuff, which produces more pollution. Eventually people have all the stuff they need and start consuming things like “a college education”, but there are so many other people who don’t yet have all the stuff they need that getting a college education involves paying other people who then go buy more stuff.

I am a big fan of stuff, so this isn’t really a criticism. For X amount of pollution one wants to get as much stuff as possible, and efficiency helps. But if one wants to reduce, say, energy consumption overall, the cost savings from efficiency alone can’t do the trick in a world where most people have a lot of unmet demand for stuff.