"The sources of pollution and environmental degradation are non-political, they are industrial, and all societies, regardless of their politics, have strong incentives to make their industrial operations as short-term efficient as they can, hang the environmental consequences. Consequences will manifest themselves on someone else's watch."

Anything described as industrial, is a specialized process to doing something, such as, if a chemist mixes up some chemical solution, this only becomes become industrial when it's done routinely and large quantities are used. Therefore milking cows can become an industrial activity. And education of children can be an industrial activity. Contrary to your claim, if anything can be said about it, industrial process tend to lower pollution, because of the efficiency of scale. Though any pollution associated with any particular process can become more concentrated in one location. If you grow a million pigs in one location, the smell of pig shit could more than in that location than if only 10 pigs were there- but spreading 10 pigs being grown over larger area so as to have a total of million pigs grown, produces the same quantity of pollution- and in many ways is creates a larger problem as far as more people smelling pig shit. In addition having a million pigs in small area, may *require* that reducing the smell pig shit is a bigger priority and the economics of harvesting the pig shit to be used for various purposes- thereby reducing the smell.

Another aspect of industry is for instance, a steel mill built away from population centers can draw human population to that location because they want live near where their job is, and other businesses and other things like schools and churches can be draw to this location because people living there. Btw, a similar thing can happen in "nature"- a volcano can make soils good for farming- farmers farm area, and population center can have tendency to be near volcanoes- which later time can erupt. Anyways, back to steel mill, where people live and where industry can operate is a political decision- it's called zoning. Therefore pollution and environmental degradation can have a lot [everything] to do with political decisions.

So I say the complete opposite: industrial processes generally reduce pollution and political processes are always the cause of increasing pollutions.
Of course, when people call a substance needed for life a pollutant [CO2] and in general one is operating from crazy ideologies it makes it rather difficult to approach the issue rationally.