Given the cutthroat competition of the world today, their top concern has to be short-term profits, without which there won't be any long term to worry about. Any capital investment has to yield almost immediate cost-savings, and this translates into automation in order to shed labor. The result usually means higher energy consumption, but this costs the capitalist less than wages. Yet many of them make the mistake of seeing the existing form of government, the State, as representative of society as a whole, and protector of the social interest. They believe the right legislation can be passed that will force corporations to adopt measures lessening damage to the environment.
Experience suggests just the opposite, however.
As far as the U.S. government is concerned, the thrust has been to protect the corporations against the environmentalists. At the '92 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. government openly represented U.S. capitalist interests when it refused to sign the biodiversity treaty. Since U.S. companies are leaders in biotechnology, they want no limitations on their right to take and use rare species from around the globe, from which they make and patent new products. At the same conference, the U.S. government also rejected caps on global-warming gasses that other nations wanted. Japan has to import virtually all its oil.