Laziness and Comfort vs. Advancing

This is what I hear when businesses argue that reducing pollution costs too much:

"If we spend money designing cleaner technology, we won't have money to create more jobs."

Designing is jobs! Instead they'd rather reduce regulation, keeping a large force of unskilled workers that won't have to learn new skills/technology or strive for advancement. This is analogous to students in a class whining that an assignment is "too hard" and forcing the instructor to cancel it or reduce the expectations  The students won't excel or learn except that complaining gives them leverage.

People would rather spend their time finding ways to avoid working, than actually doing the work asked of them. I thought capitalism is supposed to solve the "lack of incentives" problem that communism failed at.