The trouble is, short term thinking practically defines our financial and corporate culture these days. Gotta chase this quarter's growth, or our stock price might drop!

More broadly, if a business decision is good for the short term but bad for the long term, but the person making that decision doesn't expect to be around for the kind of "long term" that would show how bad it is...then that person is incentivized to make that kind of decision, absent a) regulations of some sort changing those incentives, or b) actually caring about human beings in some meaningful way.

And partly because of the general short-term-thinking-ism, it's very common—almost expected—for people of all levels to jump ship for a better paycheck after 3, 5, maybe 10 years, tops...and, of course, for the bigger short-term thinking problem (climate change), a significant percentage, if not a supermajority, of the people making the decisions that affect that don't expect to be alive long enough to see the serious effects of it, whether or not they believe they will actually happen.