Background to the launch of Entrepreneurs with Conscience

Michael Edge, a Bath based businessman and founder of London & Country, has been a major driver behind a number of projects to tackle climate change. It was Michael’s seemingly throw away comment about the need to find many more “entrepreneurs with conscience” to help in the fight against climate change, that sparked the idea for the evening. Michael is a founder member of Footdown’s Bath Fifteen leadership group. He is also the primary shareholder in 2OC, the renewable electricity company that recently formed a joint venture with National Grid to exploit the renewable energy contained in the naturally occurring geo-pressure in natural gas. The idea for 2OC came out of a Bath Fifteen meeting.

As Michael had worked successfully with all three of the leading environmental NGOs, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and The Climate Group, we initially decided that the purpose of the evening should be to persuade entrepreneurs and other businesspeople to support the work of these three organisations in whatever way they could. We decided to stage the event at one of Bath’s most prestigious venues, the Roman Baths and Pump Rooms.

The NGO directors quickly saw the potential of the evening and when Midge Ure, the quiet man behind Band Aid and Live Aid, agreed to front the event, the momentum began to build.

However, we quickly realised that there were two other equally important goals of the evening which were to:

• Demonstrate, by example, what entrepreneurs were already doing to develop and exploit new technologies to tackle climate change.
  
  
• Introduce the idea of sustainability as a defining principle for the way that all businesses should be run from now on.

We chose to do this by creating a film to show on the night that was based on interviews with environmentalists such as Jonathon Porritt, entrepreneurs such as Karl Watkin, Dale Vince and Andrew Owens and investors, such as Eric Urbani and Jørgen Philip Sørensen.

Click here to order a copy of the video of the event.