The industrial revolution ended up destroying most of our biosphere. It started an extinction event, a rapid and irreversible climate change making our planet hostile to life.
And yet people are better off than ever, with more people having been raised out of abject poverty than anyone could have imagined at the onset of the industrial revolution.
Yeah there’s an extinction event but it isn’t entirely the industrial revolution to blame since people have been driving animals into extinction for thousands of years starting, at least, with the megafauna extinctions.
It’s sad but organisms have been getting out competed, and reshaping the atmosphere and climate, for billions of years. We can pretend humans are some anomaly and that we aren’t part of nature but that isn’t the case. This extinction event will give rise to new organisms that will fill new niches just like every other one has.
That isn’t really true, we have alternatives (or have theories for alternatives) for pretty much everything we need to keep going the problem is political but over long enough periods of time the politics will likely be irrelevant.
Okay sure, but the industrial revolution has been good for pretty much every nation on the planet. Since just 1990 1.2 billion people have been risen out of abject poverty[1]. Since 1900 the number of people not living in abject poverty has increased from a few hundred million to over 6 billion[2].
So you can quip about me being American, I am, but that doesn’t change that the industrial revolution has brought untold wealth and economic, if not political, freedoms to a majority of people on the planet.
Other than that it went swimmingly.