After calculating my personal carbon footprint, I decided to learn more about what the corporations and the business world are doing to decrease their carbon footprints. I found Bill Gates’ TED talk (Energy – Innovating to Zero!) on decreasing the cost of energy particularly interesting, because he manages to link three prominent topics together: sustainability, social enterprise, and entrepreneurship. The focus of Bill Gates’ speech is the innovation of a new energy production method that will decrease the costs of energy and carbon emissions. Bill also goes on to argue that global warming will affect the global climate. And as the climate becomes more uncertain, growth of agricultural products in underdeveloped areas of the world will fluctuate also. The uncertainty will lead to unrest, and poverty will be worsened. The central idea is that with cost and carbon emission decreases, not only will business practices be more sustainable, poverty will also be alleviated.
While discussing social enterprises, we defined them as “organizations which harness the power of the marketplace to solve critical social or environmental problems.” If Bill Gates’ theory on the connections between social enterprise, sustainability, and entrepreneurship is accurate, then there should be more social enterprises dedicated toward finding this miracle energy source that will solve our environmental AND social problems.
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