The thing that really blew it was the massive industrialization of China using their massive coal reserves (just like the UK, Germany, USA etc. did) facilitated by the neoliberal globalization driven by Reagan and Thatcher (and Clinton, Bush, Blair, Obama, and the transnational business/finance elite for whom they were simply sock puppets). David Harvey's "A history of neoliberalism" gives a good coverage.
100's of millions of Chinese got lifted out of poverty through state capitalism (the only real reduction in global poverty in the past few decades), and now the Indians want to do the same. This is the nub of the problem, the worlds poor want to be as rich as the Western country's middle class. In the process they will burn a hell of a lot of hydrocarbons, and destroy the biosphere, in lieu of a "war effort" type industrial transformation.