>

The people running these companies don't give a shit because they know they'll be dead before the shit really hits the fan and actually impacts people like them.
Never forget the 2010 BP oil spill >

I'll never forget politicians (and the president at the time) deliberately getting the name of the company wrong to protect the American banks that own BP. >

What did they call it? >

British Petroleum.
It's actually an American owned company called Beyond Petroleum. >

Uh.. what?

BP p.l.c. (formerly The British Petroleum Company plc and BP Amoco plc) is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. >

Its HQ is in England.
It's owned by State Street (US), BlackRock (US), Dimensional Fund Advisors (US), Fisher Investments (US), and Menora Mivtachim (Israel). >

Ah fair enough. As majority stakeholders, they can definitely control the direction the company takes. >

Anyone who thinks oil and gas companies will voluntarily do anything beyond lip service for preventing climate change is an idiot. 
They will only act if they are forced to do so, and the only entity that has the power to force them to do so is government. >

All of that except it applies to ALL companies. >

It applies to ALL people. >

Nah, fuck that. Not everyone is a secret sociopath, dude. We normal humans have this thing called empathy that is real and isn’t something we are pretending to have. I didn’t go visit my aunt on her deathbed because I was paying some lip service or had some profit motive.
What a shitty worldview. Fuck corporations and their moral bankruptcy, absolutely, but fuck that cynical nihilistic bullshit too. There are good people in this world. >

empathy is a muscle. It isn't something that just happens at a 100% between people all of the time. Most people have, in no way, genuine empathy for others beyond their immediate knowledge. Its only for people within "arms reach" like friends and family.
It takes  incredible effort to be able to empathize beyond "arms reach" for the average person. And Empathy Fads don't count. Like for the next couple of weeks you'll see some disaster response empathy for earthquake hit areas, but that will fade once it is no longer fashionable, and people will slowly forget the burden of others. 
If empathy was so natural and easy to use, we wouldn't have homelessness, we wouldn't have starvation, we wouldn't think twice about just doing all it takes to create free medicine even if that meant slaving away personally to get the materials needed. It isn't just the sociopaths that stop this, its normal every day people who, because they need comfort in their own lives, let go of wider empathy in order to obtain it. That is not to say that people can not be trained, but we can not rely on a majority of people to do the right thing when doing the wrong thing is just so much easier. >

So, for so many people, greed trump's empathy. >

It's mostly that comfort trumps empathy for average, everyday people. So for example, take Shelf Cost.
Shelf Cost is the price a person pays when they walk into a market and look at an item on the shelf, they go "oh how nice, this battery powered fan is real cheap and I want to be cool on hot days, I will buy this fan." That person in no way thinks about the actual, real cost of that fan. They don't stop and go, "the plastics were made in a community that doesn't have regulation for spillages into watersheds by the industry that makes the plastic. The battery was mined using child labor because that community doesn't have rules against it. The motor inside that spins the blades was made in  a place where fumes are let into the air by the factory that produces the metal".  They don't think about all the carbon emissions it took to transport that fan parts, and then assemble the fan and ship the fan to the market they buy it from. A person just thinks "a fan for 9.99 with good reviews, I will buy this fan because I want it."
People want to be comfortable, they want to be cool during the hot days, so they buy the fan without putting any empathy into that decision. Its not greedy to want to be cool on a hot day.
Greed is another beast on its own. >

Greed is the beast that created that morally terrible but somehow cheap fan. >

All the money in the world means nothing when there is no world left.