Immediate rewards override distant slowly accumulating environmental harms

Evidence

A variety of conditions, some of which are documented by Wenk (1979), foster a foreshortened perspective when it comes to environmental practices. The immediate, bountiful rewards of high-consumption lifestyles easily can override distant adverse effects, especially if those effects accumulate slowly. Many of those effects are unanticipated and, to make matters worse, some are irreversible. The incentive systems of many business organizations are strongly oriented toward practices that bring profits in the short term. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2546

Categorization

• XREF: The temporal-discounting mechanism parallels the vault’s authoritarianism/social-conservatism claims about short-term self-interest overriding longer collective harms. — connects to: Environmental policymaking systematically discounts distant-future and foreign benefits against present domestic costs — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 562; Environmental protection structurally requires present sacrifice for unverifiable future gain — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 983; Knowledge of environmental harm breeds despair, not action — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1202 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2546