“Aid should be conditional on environmentalism and we should give preferential treatment in terms of trade to greener countries.”

This may work well for developing countries like say, South Africa, or Latin American countries without oil or large populations, but there is no way this is going to work with China. The main reason that China is industrializing and polluting at the such unprecedentedly high levels is to satiate the West’s demand for SHIT. Americans in particular, but also Europeans and the more developed nations in general are too accustomed to their lifestyle of consuming easily and in vast quantities. The Chinese, on the other hand, are beginning to get a taste of this society, and are willing to do anything to become a part of it as quickly as possible. I’ll admit that they are doing this in extremely irresponsible ways; for example not giving a shit about worker’s rights despite proclaiming to be Communists, or having 28 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world. These blame for these indesgressions cannot be laid at the foot of the West. However, as long as the developed nations are uncontrollably addiced to Chinese manufacturing and labor, there is no way that anybody in the world can truly become serious about tackling the major issues of the day, in particular global warming and growing money gap between rich and poor. We can talk shit about being “green” and maybe even try to do something about it, but the truth is that as long as we are married to the unsustainable consumeristic economy of the present, we will not be able to prevent the forces we have so frightfully been discussing on this mailing list for the last few months from running their course.
I don’t see a way to implement the radical reforms needed to reverse the momentum of the global interconnected society we have created without abandoning it. So really everyone is to blame for buying into the notion that producing and consuming in ever increasing quantities is what makes living worthwhile.