The only good thing about catastrophic economic collapse...

...is that it might slow down catastrophic environmental collapse.

In India, enough small steel-rolling mills around Delhi have closed that levels of sulfur dioxide (which forms acid rain) fell 85 percent in October 2008 compared with a year earlier. The recession is bringing a green dividend in the developed world, too. Reduced economic activity is projected to cut Europe's emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief man-made greenhouse gas, by 100 million tons in 2009, and the United States' by about the same amount.

Andrew Sullivan addresses the question of whether, painful as it might be, this slowdown in careening cancer-cell like economic growth wasn't exactly what we and the world really needed right now.