This is science

I’m confused. You’re saying that despite the US being a brighter spot now if the whole planet were covered in pollution it would be brighter than the US?

The grey is smoke and pollutants. What powers the majority of electricity on the planet? Coal. What dose the US import a metric fuck ton of? Coal and oil. What dose the US waste a lot of? Electricity. What happens when you burn coal and oils for power? Make smoke. See where I'm going with this? Not to mention factories and 24 hour business and major locations like Vegas and New York that don't turn any power off at any point for any reason (which is why you can see the US from space), this basically means if the the whole planet is covered in noxious gass and pollution clouds how would one of the biggest producers of these pollutants would be the most visible from space and not the rest of the planet?

The “factories and 24 hours business and major locations like Vegas and New York..”. If the US is more visible than the rest of the world now, if you cover the world in smoke it will still be more visible for the same reason because you haven’t changed it’s relative light output.

The US is more visible because of light pollution and the fact that the whole world doesn't produce enough toxic gasses to cover any small area completely in clouds of pollutants, but if very country on the planet did produce enough to cover vision of their whole country from space the USA would be one of the most obscured (possibly obscuring countries next to it it would produce so much) or one of the most visible because it would produce one of the biggest, darkest clouds on the planet so thick you'd be able to identify it through the sheer volume of impenetrable gass it would produce. Aka the USA would make a cloud so thick or so large you wouldn't be able to see it from space because it would cover itself in either one of the thickest or biggest pollutant clouds on the planet, light ain't getting through that.

That reasoning is pretty shaky. The US is mostly covered by forest and farmland. The kind of pollutants you’re talking about are only produced in certain areas and would not concentrate themselves over the country even if they were produced there. You would have to output visible pollutants at a tremendous rate to overcome the natural distribution of them throughout the atmosphere. By the time they were thick enough to actual block light completely everyone would be dead and there would be no human produced light anyway.

I think he means at night? Because unless there is cloud cover or a dust storm, every single place on Earth is visible from space in daylight