“Everybody has selfish instincts“, but the magnitude of “selfishness” required to amass a wealth of a billion dollars is way way beyond “normal”. Whether that guarantees sociopathy or not is not a simple question I guess.
It’s a very different and more extreme example, but I remember being really struck by this when I first visited the US Holocaust Museum: even if some at the top were true sociopaths, many of the major perpetrators who were profiled at the museum were seemingly psychologically “normal” people who committed unthinkable acts (often because that was the way to climb the ladder in the hierarchy) and rationalized them somehow so they could sleep at night. To me that was just terrifying: I’d always sort of thought that the people who did these things must have been so abnormal as to be barely recognizable as human, but if they weren’t, what then? Then it could happen anywhere and to anybody if we don’t get serious about teaching moral courage. The Germans today know this very well, but I’m not sure Americans (and presumably others) absorbed the lesson.
I think it’s tempting to try to explain terrible people as being fundamentally different from oneself, because then we don’t have to worry about how not to become like them. It’s rather scary to think that they’re not so different, but if they’re not, we have to ask ourselves what we’d do different if we found ourselves in their position, whether that’s running a little startup that turned into a big corporation or serving in the Dutch state bureaucracy in 1940.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disor...
"Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
Somewhere between 1 in 8 and 1 in 25 CEOs "exhibit psychopathic traits". I'd guess there's a very strong overlap between those CEOs and billionaires.
When you're talking about billionaires, I think statistics from the general population aren't really relevant.
Out of the blue, I'm thinking that everyone on earth would have to use 20%-30% less energy on a daily basis to effectively slow or reverse the process of climate change. Technological improvement seems much more realistic, to me.
Rather than trying to change the habits of everyone on earth, a more realistic goal would be to change a fraction of these corporate polluters.
Efforts to place the responsibility of climate change on individuals is mostly corporate propaganda. Not that altering our habits wouldn't be an improvement, but it's not addressing the main cause of the problem.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Furthermore, as long as fossil fuels exist as a mainstream energy sources, fossil fuel companies, whether a great many small ones, or a few huge ones, will represent a very large proportion of the emissions. You can't change them, that's just literally what they are. You have to either stop them (e.g. make fossil fuel extraction illegal) or change everyone else to remove the market (e.g. encourage use of sustainables, including nuclear, everywhere).
If you start something to benefit other people, you run a charity or a non profit.
Companies are started and run by people who want to make money for themselves and their investors. You might be using “benefitting our customers” as a tool in your profit-making, but it’s not why you get out of bed every morning (whether you admit it to yourself or not).
The optimist in me observes that there really has been a “massive change” in renewable energy in the last few decades. Too little and too slow, perhaps, but who would have imagined 20 or 30 years ago that we’d have electricity prices dropping below zero at times because of an over abundance of wind and solar power?
I also believe that _people_ reducing their daily energy use by 30% is totally a realistic thing. Where I am (.au) the energy market is going crazy, with electricity retailers bumping prices by 30-50%, and even publicly advising customers to go elsewhere because their rates are going to jump by so much. Almost everybody I know has had discussions lately about what the best way to reduce energy use is. All these price rises are going to tart hitting peoples bills at the end of this month or quarter, and I’m positive those energy saving discussions are going to ramp up then.
It is, but it will have more or less 0 effect on global warming if nothing else changes. The global shipping industry, manufacturing of trillions of tons of junk no one actually needs are the biggest problems. Cheap fashion, cheap gadgets, cheap toys, cheap home decor, cheap jewelry and many other things which go from resource in the ground to cheap junk back to landfill in less than a year, while directly producing CO2 in chemical refinent processes, and indirectly producing more CO2 in energy costs, and producing more CO2 to be shipped halfway across the globe.
And all propped up by a marketing and advertisement industry that works very hard to find new psychological tricks to manipulate adults and children to buy more of all of these.
Of course, other more useful industries are also massively wasteful - inordinate amounts of food are produced, transported around the world, stored in massive warehouses until they are no longer considered sellable, and then thrown away. Same with cars, furniture, appliances.
And let's not forget the vast amounts of computation being thrown away - most spectacularly by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also by so many advertising AI projects, mobile "games" that are just slot machines without any payout, and just general waste (we've built our backend in JS and run it on a Python interpreter in a container in an x86 VM running on an ARM processor, in a cluster with three master nodes for 1 worker node because we have to be highly available for our 3 customers who open the app once every week).
I think what you mean is the wholesale spot price dropped below zero at some times due to an over production of electricity generated by renewables.
I'm not aware if any retail customers being paid to use electricity.
I'm not as optimistic as you about people reducing electricity consumption here in Australia, much of it is nondiscretionary.
What we need is federal level legislation to protect at least some of our gas and oil production for the local market, like Western Australia has.