“It became clear that they’re motivated by profits,” said Roberts, adding that the drive is unsurprising, since CEOs of public companies can be removed if they do not maximize profit growth.

We really need governments to force triple bottom line accounting onto corporations for the very reason stated in the above quote. While CEOs are only accountable to the shareholders of the company (single bottom line accounting) then they will only ever work for profit.

With triple bottom line accounting, CEOs would not only be accountable to the shareholders (economic accouting), but to stakeholders (social accounting) and the environment (ecological accounting).

To use fossil fuel companies as an example, a stakeholder to that company would be any person who has to breathe in the pollution that said fossil fuel company released into the atmosphere. The way in which companies would be accountable to the environment is that they could no longer ignore the externalities of their product (e.g. pollution from fossil fuel use) and the cost of those externalities would need to be included in the upfront cost of the product. Accounting for these things would then allow us to see the true upfront cost of fossil fuels, which should aid in actually getting companies to act on these issues, as it will less profitable to sell such a damaging product. It will also further demonstrate that the upfront cost of renewable is far lower than that of fossil fuels.

It still isn’t a perfect solution, and we will still be living under capitalism and the idea of infinite growth, but it would at least be a step in the direction of corporate accountability.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line