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From my experience capitalism and climate activism are incompatible ideologies. Capitalism is entirely, without a doubt, entirely focused on the bottom line. If it doesn't make them more money and/or costs them more money, they're against it. That's why something as universally bad as smoking took so long to be essentially outed as a problem, and something people should actively avoid. Just watch "thank you for smoking" for more detail on that one.
Cleaning up factory emissions and by-products/waste, doesn't earn companies any money. It's the right thing to do, but it's far easier and cheaper to simply dump the raw waste into the environment. Whether thats chemical runoff, or toxic fumes, or carbon emissions, etc. To safely collect and dispose of the by-products is an expensive process.
Any efforts from companies that are "green" is either that they can offer you a marginally less-bad (environmentally) product at a reduced cost to them. Whether that is because they passed those costs onto the consumer, or because the "green" alternative is actually cheaper, is the only question. As soon as the "green" alternative costs them more and they can't justify an increase in product cost for being "green", they simply won't do it. Anything outside of this scope is simply a PR stunt to try to gain favor with the more environmentally conscious consumers to try to pull them away from their current brand loyalties, over to your brand.
Pretty much all pr stunts of this sort are one-offs, to give the illusion of making an effort, while doing essentially nothing actually helpful.
Unless they can somehow make a profit from "saving the planet" then they won't do it. It's against their very nature.
the conclusion is correct, but might I also add that it's because of short term profit, today not tomorrow.
if capitalism just focused on long term profit, then climate would be tackled, as well as health issues like smoking. these things are all unprofitable.
This is completely valid. I didn't want to get into the economics of short term vs long term gains, etc.
There's a paradox in environmental activism, like with many other things. Basically, if you do everything in your power to avoid an environmental catastrophe, and that catastrophe does not happen, then, did it simply not happen because it never would have happened? Or did your impact avoid the issue?
There's no way to know.
You know what you can tell really quickly? This quarters profits.... Something that seems to be a focus of every capitalist ever.
Drive the earth into becoming an unlivable hellscape, but for a short time, create a lot of value for the shareholders.