The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development concluded last month in Johannesburg, South Africa. Real progress was made in debunking a recurring and fundamental error. Here’s the error: Most environmental problems are due to modernization and affluence.

In fact, across time and cultures, technological advances and economic growth have proved the only sure path to a cleaner, safer environment. Every serious analyst acknowledges this. And as the late Indian leader Indira Ghandi put it, “Poverty is the worst polluter.”

Though some Greens continue to claim that environmental quality and economic prosperity are incompatible, summit participants rejected this claim. They recognized that developing nations face immediate threats to human health and the environment. Faster economic growth, combined with targeted international aid, will help poor countries solve these problems.

The focus at Johannesburg was on the basics—improving access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and reducing indoor air pollution from home cooking fueled by dung, wood, and kerosene. These are the leading preventable causes of death in the developing world.

Participants also agreed to tackle “energy poverty,” while rejecting calls to boost the use of renewable energy. The massive subsidies required to promote renewables are simply too expensive, especially for developing nations. Jerry Taylor of the libertarian Cato Institute said, “We’re the wealthiest country in the world, and we couldn’t afford the subsidies. If we can’t afford them…what makes us think they’ll be able to in Nairobi?”

However, some alternative energy sources, such as solar, are successfully expanding into niche markets. This is a positive trend that will continue. Economies like ecosystems evolve toward opportunities. Remote locations are fertile ground for solar electricity, e.g., to pump water for livestock and wildlife.

At the summit Greens continued to criticize citizens in the West for consuming too much of the world’s resources. The statistic is well known: the richest 20 percent of world consumes 80 percent of world’s resources. But our consumption does not come at the expense of the Third World or the global environment. Here’s why.

First: The West doesn’t simply consume natural resources. Raw materials (e.g., minerals, oil, wood) are simply that. Human ingenuity and technology transform them into useful, desirable products. As our technology improves, so does our ability to expand the same stock of resources.

This explains a paradox. By many measures fossil fuels, minerals, and food are ever more abundant and less expensive even in the face of growing consumption.

Second: If the U.S. magically reduced its consumption, would more resources be available for people in the developing world? Of course not. Turning raw material into valued resources requires capital investments and technological expertise. Leaving more copper in the ground will not make a larger share available to an electrician in Botswana.

Aside from external predation or invasion, virtually everything needed to foster progress and reduce poverty depends on domestic policies. Consider South Korea, China, and even India. Their progress in enhancing human welfare flows from these countries’ liberalization of their economies and opening of their borders to trade and investment.

But some countries, notably in Africa and the Middle East, have opted out of the modernization process. As a result, misery there has increased. Others, particularly in southern Africa, have been so debilitated by disease that they are unable to modernize. How can we help them?

One concrete step is for the West to open its markets to the goods that many poor countries are best suited to produce, namely food and textiles. It is outrageous that rich countries preach free trade to the poor while lavishing over $300 billion a year to subsidize the overproduction of their own farmers.

Global capitalism is inherently disruptive. It brings social and environmental stress. The logic driving it is relentless. But there is a very bright side.

One chief lesson of the 20th century is that a technologically robust, market-based economy raises living standards ever higher, faster, and more inclusively than any other system. Developing countries make as much progress in a generation as industrialized nations did in a century.

This should be clear to affluent Greens. To ignore or deny it is at best insensitive.