Agreed, quarterly earnings reports will be the death of us, at the present rate the Apocalypse will roughly coincide with record profits.

This never made sense to me as an argument. Climate change is driven by transportation, electricity, and energy primarily. We burned fossil fuels because until recently there was no better alternatives. Sure, had we known in the 50s and 60s about the potential harms of ICEs we might have build out cities pretty differently and transportation would be a smaller slice but we'd still need electricity, heating, and industrial goods. Maybe we could have built more Nuclear and electrified more things, but Nuclear was in decline before the science on climate change shaped up.

Moreover, trying to drive quarterly earnings is what is now causing wind to displace coal.

They key term is 'externalization' and in this case a more interesting form called 'temporal externalization'. The idea is that in order to achieve short term financial gain the downsides are spread either in space (to the rest of current society or some faraway place) or in time (by moving the bill to the next generation).

Climate change is the posterchild for both of these. Other examples are pollution, resource depletion etc.

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-6...