the answers to such questions always comes down to money, the holy grail of capitalism (hold the barrage, have owned three businesses including a registered corporation) is profit over everything else, with few companies such as Patagonia embracing responsible corporate management.
The basic model in the US is exploit the market, disregard long term investments in sounder technology/processes in order to wring dry the current capital investment, and walk away from the business when it has been wrung dry with zero responsibility to any mitigation, i.e. properly cap methane emitting wellheads, properly encapsulate slurry fields, remove hazmat from shuttered factories, etc. Think of the hundreds of millions in legal fees spent by US oil firms to fight cleanups in court instead of just spending those dollars on the actual cleanup. How many next generation engines are in the labs, the design engineers pushing hard for adoption, their masters saying not yet, we can still get another few years out of these four decade old engine designs.
Or correcting the most basic issues such as Subaru had with an iteration of their 4 cyl engines that had faulty piston rings which allowed excessive blow-by to the tune of 2 - 3 quarts every thousand miles. Instead of immediately correcting the core problem by changing outsource vendors to provide a properly spec'd'piston ring, and issuing recalls to affected engines for ring replacement, Subaru put tens of thousands of customers as well as service depts across the country through the wringer...having to document the oil loss over a period of months, write to Subaru to demand action, write more letters, make more calls. All because Subaru decided it was more cost effective to place the burden on it's customers instead of profit margin, allowing four years of crap engine rings to come off the line, hundreds of thousands of engines pumping blow-by oil into our air.
VW? In 2015, the EPA found that Volkswagen's 2009–2015 2.0 liter diesel cars had software that activated emissions controls only during testing, making them appear compliant with US standards. In reality, the vehicles were emitting 40x the NOx levels allowed, producing over 46,000 tons of excess pollution from those engines alone.
There are endless examples such as above that reflect the business as usual model of corporate greed and environmental irresponsibility. A model mirrored, perhaps unconsciously, by the millions of shareholders in those companies, who might recycle their plastic at home and drive a Prus, and still demand max ROI from their retirement portfolios...
The basic model in the US is exploit the market, disregard long term investments in sounder technology/processes in order to wring dry the current capital investment, and walk away from the business when it has been wrung dry with zero responsibility to any mitigation, i.e. properly cap methane emitting wellheads, properly encapsulate slurry fields, remove hazmat from shuttered factories, etc. Think of the hundreds of millions in legal fees spent by US oil firms to fight cleanups in court instead of just spending those dollars on the actual cleanup. How many next generation engines are in the labs, the design engineers pushing hard for adoption, their masters saying not yet, we can still get another few years out of these four decade old engine designs.
Or correcting the most basic issues such as Subaru had with an iteration of their 4 cyl engines that had faulty piston rings which allowed excessive blow-by to the tune of 2 - 3 quarts every thousand miles. Instead of immediately correcting the core problem by changing outsource vendors to provide a properly spec'd'piston ring, and issuing recalls to affected engines for ring replacement, Subaru put tens of thousands of customers as well as service depts across the country through the wringer...having to document the oil loss over a period of months, write to Subaru to demand action, write more letters, make more calls. All because Subaru decided it was more cost effective to place the burden on it's customers instead of profit margin, allowing four years of crap engine rings to come off the line, hundreds of thousands of engines pumping blow-by oil into our air.
VW? In 2015, the EPA found that Volkswagen's 2009–2015 2.0 liter diesel cars had software that activated emissions controls only during testing, making them appear compliant with US standards. In reality, the vehicles were emitting 40x the NOx levels allowed, producing over 46,000 tons of excess pollution from those engines alone.
There are endless examples such as above that reflect the business as usual model of corporate greed and environmental irresponsibility. A model mirrored, perhaps unconsciously, by the millions of shareholders in those companies, who might recycle their plastic at home and drive a Prus, and still demand max ROI from their retirement portfolios...
