Yeah sure, clear more land for development, Australia, it's not like the lack of trees will dry everything out and raise temperatures in a place that is already dangerously hot. What's a heat island? Oh, look, fire!
Oh, you didn't even clear those trees for anything important planned and just stuck up a sign saying "new industrial opportunities!" Boy, that sure was worth cutting into a previously protected forest and killing a bunch of endangered koalas and quolls for!
Oh look, the slop warehouse you replaced that native forest with has a koala for a logo! We sure love our national icons! I wonder where all the real koalas went?
They're not idiots, they're just ghouls that value their interests. It may appear short sighted, but I think the pandemic showed this too, how you can't even use the bourgeois state to preserve capitalism because that means admitting that using the state to benefit proles was always an option, and that threatens them both short and long term.
From what I'm reading about the covid inquiry from the UK, the people in charge are in fact gigantic idiots. Seems like a lethal mixture of naked corruption and callous ignorance.
I think some are idiots and some are ghouls and the proportion varies depending on the circumstances. Nowdays it's a lot of idiots.
They are not mutually exclusive either.