Several folks have already taken note of this but I wanted to add a few thoughts.

Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute seems to be inadvertantly making the case for climate change legislation. First, he lists a series of things environmentalists predicted would happen assuming business as usual levels of pollution. Then, using this chart, he shows that four major sources of air pollution have decreased significantly since 1980.

Perry gives all of the credit for these environmental victories to improvements in energy efficiency. But as Matthew Yglesias points out, he got it all wrong:

In the real world, what happened is that we passed environmental laws, and conservatives argued that they would destroy the economy. And yet here’s the economy, undestroyed. And here’s the environment, cleaned up.