Actually it did pan out. You just weren't paying attention.

Chinese cities had terrible air quality 20 years ago. Now they don't.

The Chinese and Indian governments have climate change plans that they're actively working on, sometimes ahead of schedule. The current US government has banned the words "climate change" in official documents.

They are not quite there yet. China now has a huge middle class, but they also still have a massive underclass. It’s too early to claim these projections were wrong. I think they are misguided, but there is no denying that China now pays more attention to pollution than it did a decade or two ago. There are massive investments to clean the air in large cities. Same in India: the situation is dire but the political cost of supporting the status quo keeps increasing.

It's not magical thinking; it just doesn't happen overnight. The real question is as we get relatively less wealthy in the West, will we start moving the other direction?

China

China deploys more solar and wind power then the US.

Americans seem to love to count their past successes and then declare the game is over and they won.

History doesn't end though.