Sadly this is true, but it still seems illogical every time it happens.
Edit: Illogical because while you may be making money now, your actions will cause you to loose your assets in the long term.
Edit: Illogical because while you may be making money now, your actions will cause you to loose your assets in the long term.
If you can compete better right now by doing X, at the cost of your business 30 years down the road, the incentives, long and short, probably line up with doing X. As an individual, you do it, and hope that in 30 years, you've earned enough to retire or transition to another revenue form. If you go the sustainable route, as someone else pointed out, you likely get out-competed by someone who didn't, and have to find an alternative livelihood even sooner. It's a snowballing issue, where even modest benefits in the short term actually result in massive benefits in the long term, despite a long term penalty.
So, the only way to align incentives with long-term, is for penalties to be applied short-term for behaviors that will impact an industry long-term. Otherwise every individual decision-maker has to weigh whether they are better off making their money and moving on versus trying to compete with a handicap long enough for the long haul.
Let's say that you have 'sustainability', fill in that word however you want, in mind when building your business. But a company who's primary concern is growth will most likely surge ahead of you, possibly squeezing them out of the market. That company can't just retrofit those 'sustainability' practices as by this time they are expected to continue their revenue and company culture is extremely difficult to change.
Like if you want to develop a running habit then eat a cake after every run and then after a while stop eating the cake. Then you start looking forward to the run because you anticipate eating cake which after a while becomes a running habit. Substitute whatever you like for the cake. It's all hacks though.
Humanity is basically doomed. At some point the thinking that we can innovate ourselves out of every dilemma we got ourselves into will stop working because the complexity of the dilemma keeps growing and technology will stop being the panacea it is at a certain level of complexity.
We're not all automatons that think alike and share the environmental ideas that you do.