This is true as individuals, but importantly as a society we have far more agency than sometimes it feels like when you watch us all acting out our own individual self-destruction.
Banning CFCs, making seatbelts a legal requirement, making drink driving illegal, gun control (in countries outside the USA), regulations on school canteens. These are all examples of coordination where we've solved problems further upstream so that individuals don't have to fight against their own greedy, self-serving, short-sighted nature.
We do have the ability to fix this stuff, it's just messy.
I didn't mean to imply that, they definitely can be those things and far worse. But there are many examples of societal coordination that achieve the exact opposite of that (Scandinavian countries are of course the canonical example).
Banning CFCs, making seatbelts a legal requirement, making drink driving illegal, gun control (in countries outside the USA), regulations on school canteens. These are all examples of coordination where we've solved problems further upstream so that individuals don't have to fight against their own greedy, self-serving, short-sighted nature.
We do have the ability to fix this stuff, it's just messy.