An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners

In this case, scrubbing the flue gasses and recycling the coal ash resulted in toxic drywall. This isn't to say all drywall is toxic but it illustrates one illusion of something being clean or green.

Alas, money is always an overriding concern. Your adherence to local cultural regulations may or may not buy you good karma, but that karma is not redeemable beyond your current social group. You won't pay for supplies out of it, and you won't build your house with it. But you can do that with money, regardless of where you are. So money tends to displace everything else out of sheer utility. Of course it can't substitute for every social interaction, but then you also don't want to run scarcity economy on karma.

Corporate boards are elected by their shareholders specifically to optimize for profitability above and beyond any other criteria. (Which is hard work! That’s why “corporate board-member” is a paid gig—it requires hard mental self-trickery to get into that mindset, plus a lot of cognitive dissonance to stay in that mindset, and those both take a lot out of you, emotionally.)

A good example of this: recycling. Social norms have caused people within corporations to favour recycling, and so, for example, office managers will implement recycling and waste-reduction programs, where employees must sort their waste into bins, etc.

But this is entirely uncoupled from whether the corporation itself will implement recycling on an industrial scale. Most of the corporations that have recycling bins in their hallways, don’t have any recycling or waste-reduction programs going for their products or services, or for the manufacturing and logistics pipelines serving them. If norms were enough to influence corporations to do so, they’d have long done so; society has been pushing corporations to care about the environment, in every way we can think of, since the 1970s.

But look at it from the corporation’s perspective: a few bins for the office, and a contract with a recycling company to empty them, just makes the “offices” line-item cost a tiny bit more. It’s an eensy-weensy operational expense. But doing something like Apple does, where they design their phones to not include non-recyclable materials, and accept them back for trade-in specifically to recycle the components? That’s something that requires large capital expenditures to implement, and so that’s something you have to convince your shareholders is worth doing.

And, if you’re a public company, your shareholders probably aren’t humans themselves, but rather other corporations like mutual-fund management houses. And those companies are operating under the principle that their goal is to make their fund participants high returns—not to invest in ways that those fund participants would prefer, or even find ethical.

The social more is never going to take effect, because (public) corporations have boards of people who are paid to only think about money, and shareholders who are also mostly corporations with boards paid to think solely of the profitability of their investments. Never do human preferences or human norms enter into the board’s equation for “what should the corporation do, from a top-down perspective.” Public corporations are about as able to be influenced by human norms as an alien or an AI. (They can be influenced if their workers form a union and then that union strikes to express its disagreement with the corporation over some social norm. But that’s less about the corporation “understanding” or “appreciating” the norm, and more about how an organism under threat will do things it doesn’t want to do to appease a predator.)

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Tangent: The only reason Apple “gets away with” having an industrial recycling program, is that they’ve made it into a feature of their product, part of its marketing, in a way that appeals to their particular user-base (i.e. upper-middle-class people who usually have some guilt over how their purchasing affects the environment.) They used this “increased appeal to our customer-base -> increased sales” argument to convince those corporate share-holders to okay the program.

That situation, though, is pretty unique. Most companies in the world aren’t selling expensive, “trendy” items, with the kind of customer-base that “we implemented a recycling program for our product” or “we reduced our factories’ emissions” would appeal to. And even the ones that are, aren’t necessarily selling the majority of units into cultures with norms like our own; Chinese manufacturers, for example, might be able to establish a recycling program for goods sold abroad, but they likely won’t get much uptake for a recycling program for goods sold domestically in China. If that’s where their board and their shareholders reside, then that recycling program (and associated CapEx) is just not gonna happen.

Money upset the mobile phone business which was a lazy cartel controlled by carriers, who functioned as monopsony customers of phone manufacturers. Europe's market was more dynamic than the the US and Japan due to regulation but still the phones weren't amazing. Then about a decade ago Apple blew up not just the design of phones but more importantly IMHO the relationships between the end users, manufacturers, and the carriers.

I cite this as a proof that it can happen but in general I think regulation to manage externalities is underused due to ideology. Yet as a businessperson I don't consider regulation inherently evil -- in fact, for example, a safety reg which applies to everyone doesn't disadvantage any one company.