That isn't even approximately true as a blanket statement (labor unions and political parties in the US are, in fact, usually corporations), and, a perusal of actual corporate charters will show that it's not literally true even in specific cases.
> In the US, that's a legal requirement... people face fines or worse if they don't.
No, it's not, though that's a popular myth around the fiduciary dutied of corporate officers. [0]
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi...
Please don’t spread misinformation. That’s not what fiduciary duty actually means. There are plenty of corporations that fund charity efforts without their execs landing in jail. “Profit above all else” is not enshrined in law.
Right, exactly, which is why I took issue with capitalism in my original post. Companies are acting completely rationally under our current economic system, and it's literally destroying the ground from under our feet.
A corporation's literal only job is to seek profits above all else. In the US, that's a legal requirement (Edit: I was very wrong about this). That doesn't make a corporation some subversive evil entity, more like an algorithm that finds solutions optimized for one variable. They do what they do because it's what makes them the most money. And remember, they have to operate this way (Edit: I was wrong about legal requirements on this).
So we can change the problem space by making it more expensive to behave in certain ways. Aka, regulation/emissions taxes.