Acid rain was very real, and it did kill all of the fish in the lakes in huge parts of Ontario and Quebec by altering the PH levels of the water there. It was a large scale ecological disaster. It also caused huge changes in the American coal industry by forcing unfiltered coal fired generators to close down, after intensive political negotiations between the US and Canada over this issue. Electricity from coal was dirt cheap and was one of the main sources of power generation for the American car manufacturers, and other heavy industries, in what later become known as the the rust belt. Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney fixed this: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/statement-acid-rain Anyways, now we have clean coal plants with basically zero harmful emissions, and no more acid rain here. China is a different story. One case where government regulation actually worked as it is supposed to. Really bad air pollution back in the 1970's was a very real thing. Garbage was also a real problem. Land fill was basically just a hole in the ground. They didn't yet know about polluting the water tables, or that the fairly new chemical industry of post WWII was poisoning the shit out of everything. Now, 50 years later, most garbage is actually very carefully processed. Recycling is everywhere. Just freely polluting the environment is mostly no longer allowed. Air emissions are also tightly regulated. Water tables are regulated and controlled by water authorities. Modern cars pollute very little compared to their 1970's counterparts, and the fuel itself is cleaner. We are still playing catch up with the chemical thing, but there has been progress there too. The left has hijacked the environmental movement to use it to push their communist agenda and carbon taxation financial scams. However, what conservatives forget is that the real environmental movement was always a conservative cause. We invented it, and it was called conservationism. Who spends more time in the real wilderness? Not communists from the cities, but rural folk that go to church and vote republican. The National Parks system was started by a Conservative president. We are environmentalists - just not mindless fanatics. We find real solutions for real problems and then fix them.