It seems pretty tough to tell developing countries that they cannot work to achieve our standard of living...
I dunno, I feel like we could improve our standard of living. For example, among the new threads today is "Hour each way commute, or 5 minutes each way commute with $12,000 pay cut?" Spending about 500 hours a year commuting... this is an actual question, apparently.
By walking and cycling more, having work and home closer, we'd have improved physical and mental health, more time with family and friends and on hobbies, and so on. By not buying every new piece of junk that comes along we'd feel less anxious at keeping up with the Joneses, and suffer less of the paradox of choice. By eating less meat and processed food, we'd improve our health. And so on.
If you look at a listing of
the world's happiest countries, GDP per capita is in there which correlates moderately with emissions, but the other factors don't. The top countries include a few high emitters like Canada, but also some low emitters like Costa Rica - which ranks higher than the US. And some very high emitters, very "well-developed" countries like UAE are lower.
So there isn't a simple equation of more emissions = happier people.
Maybe we in the West should improve our lifestyles.
In any case, resource constraints will mean that we're simply not going to see a world of cars and freeways and everyone zipping about on 747s. There's just not enough fossil fuels. Even if burning coal gave us vitamin C, the stuff is limited. We used it up first, the Third World misses out. Sorry. They were late to the party and the binge drinkers finished off all the booze.