Is money green in more ways than one?

[PLC1]

According to this article, it may be.

Those projections make it easy to assume that affluence and technology inflict more harm on the environment. But while pollution can increase when a country starts industrializing, as people get wealthier they can afford cleaner water and air. They start using sources of energy that are less carbon-intensive — and not just because they’re worried about global warming. The process of “decarbonization” started long before Al Gore was born.

The old wealth-is-bad IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn’t jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day.

IPAT theory:

Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology.

IPAT seems not to work in the real world. A better model might be Kuznets curve. Here is an example, referring to sulphur dioxide pollution:

Pollution increases up to a point, then drops off as the nation becomes affluent enough to address the problem of pollution. The red vs green curves are interesting, too. The green line shows countries with strong protections for property rights; the red curve shows countries with weaker protections.

Could it be that strong protections for property rights actually lead to less pollution?