I don't think technological development is correlated with efficiency or pollution at all. Efficiency and pollution reduction are goals that technology can be developed for (or not). In recent history, we have developed a lot of technology with the goal of reducing pollution so it might seem like technological development leads to a reduction in pollution, but if you looked the industrial revolution, there was a lot of technological development that lead to increased pollution because our goals were different. In a lot of cases, we actually lose efficiency by implementing technology to reduce pollution (clean coal) because we are wasting some energy to deal with the byproducts of the energy generation process. Nuclear power is the same way, there is actually some really nasty waste generated, but we implement technology to eliminate or contain it that reduces the overall efficiency of the energy generation process.
As a side note, pollution is not necessarily inefficiency, it's just the byproduct of reactions being released into the environment. It can be reduced by improving the chemical process to generate less byproducts or by containing/dealing with the byproducts. Perfectly efficient combustion still generates byproducts. Very few reactions actually have zero negative byproducts, even at perfect efficiency (maybe nuclear fusion or hydrogen + oxygen combustion).