Will a rise in the national standard of living worsen or improve the country's environmental conditions?

The rise in the national standard of living in the long term will improve the country's environmental conditions. However, in the short term, the country's environmental conditions will initially worsen. When raising the minimum wage (in order to improve standard of living) this may seem like a good idea but in reality it will not be what people think. Businesses are under strict direction to maintain a certain employee salary/wage minimum/maximum hours or amount to be paid. By raising the minimum wage to be higher, and not addressing where the money will come from within the companies budgets, the initial reaction from the companies will be to cut the employees hours down and make a smaller amount of people do the amount of work needed with more people. Therefore, initially it will decrease standard of living because employees will have to obtain more than 1 or 2 jobs and worry about the means of transportation to get to and from and scheduling conflicts etc.