Whether you’re an individual or a business, See Through has options for you to join, help and promote our mission to measurably reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But you probably won’t. 

This article outlines options for people and groups who share See Through’s Goal of ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’ to help. The prize – and the price – of these zero-budget projects is transparency, which means it’s not for everyone.

The See Through Ecosystem

See Through’s Goal, methodology, and projects are described at www.seethroughtogether.org, but the ecosystem’s key features are:

• Metric: we measure success/failure using the same unit as climate scientists, i.e. tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered (‘CO₂e’).
• No bank account: liberates See Through from the tyranny of money, permitting us to devote 100% of our efforts to the Goal, rather than its corrupting and diverting proxy.
• Radical transparency: whatever the climate question, the answer tends to be transparency, so our default position is to make all our data and methodology public and open source. If you can’t buy integrity, why should you be able to sell it?
• Storytelling: facts convince us, but emotion drives us. Climate action requires both, so we blend hard science with sophisticated storytelling.

How To Help: Individuals

For individuals, four levels of escalating commitment mirror our four-stage Engagement Journey by which we seek to move ordinary people from climate inaction to effective climate action. The ‘Four Cs’, representing different degrees of help, are:

Consumer

• You give: engage online (e.g. Subscribe, Share, Comment, Like etc.) with See Through content via social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn.
• You gain: proof of your online activity via social media platforms.

Contributor

• You give: participation in a See Through project.
• You gain: visible, shareable involvement via a See Through website.

Counsellor

• You give: expertise, contacts or public endorsement of a See Through project to a significant network.
• You gain: listing as a Counsellor/Advisor on a See Through website.

Colleague

• You give: join a working team to develop, support,  market, maintain or administer one or more See Through projects.
• You gain: listing as Colleague/Staff on a See Through website.

To discover which See Through project might best match your personal goals, needs and capacity, fill in our form and we’ll make some suggestions. 

How to Help: Businesses/Groups

For Businesses or groups like NGOs or government bodies, we have the ‘Four Ps’, representing different degrees of help:

Participant

• You give: take part in any See Through project, via our websites or in person.
• You gain: a shareable See Through URL demonstrating your participation.

Pioneer

• You give: step forward as a first or early adopter of a prototype See Through project
• You gain: public credit on a See Through website.

Partner

• You give: publish a Memorandum of Understanding with a See Through legal entity.
• You gain: transparent proof of your pro bono support of the See Through ecosystem.

Patron

• You give: publish a contract with a See Through Partner.
• You gain: transparent proof your support extends beyond donations-in-kind.

To discover which See Through project might best match your goals, needs and capacity, fill in our form and we’ll make some suggestions. 

Is the See Through Ecosystem Suitable For You?

Statistically, probably not. 

See Through’s own ‘target audience’ analysis reckons 80-90% of us are inactive due to feeling impotent, or out of despair. 

Most of the remainder are inactive due to delusional denial. These outright climate deniers and denialists are what we term ‘Willing Inactivists’.

The obstacles to moving from inaction to action are considerable, but are generally higher for businesses than for individuals:

• Individuals: joining a See Through project only requires you to convince one person – yourself. With no boards of directors, shareholders, investors, employees, customers etc. to convince, the only constraint is your own time and commitment.

• Groups: See Through News’s Tour de France model predicts that while 100% of business bosses think of themselves as leaders, 98% are actually followers. See Through works with the 2% of authentic first movers/early adopters, who the others will follow.

Whether you’re an individual, business, NGO, government body or other group, doing nothing is easier than doing something. 

If that ‘something’ is related to the inconvenient truth of human-induced climate change, coming up with justifications for doing nothing is easy.

Smart storytelling, formalised in See Through’s C-Bomb Ratings, can reduce this friction, but only for the minority who are persuadable.

The percentage of people prepared to both self-identify as a ‘climate activist’ and to commit to doing something effective (i.e. requiring a radical departure from business as usual) is low. 

This is why our climate crisis is deepening.

To put a more precise probability on whether joining the See Through ecosystem is for you, here are some numbers:

• Businesses/Groups: around 2% are early adopters (the good news is that the other 98% are followers, once someone else goes first). 
• Individuals: historically, around 3.5% of any given population can trigger change via street protests. Encouraging, but energy is easily dissipated with distance, especially if conducted online.
• Ineffective Activists: of the minority who self-identify as ‘climate activists’, the majority are Ineffective Activists. They are ineffective, from an emissions-reducing perspective at least, because the actions they take  (clicking on a non-binding online petition, paying an annual membership fee, arguing with a climate denier stranger, litter-picking etc.), whatever their other merits, do not measurably reduce carbon.

If you still think you might be what See Through defines as an Effective Activist, this checklist may help:

Inaction: Prudent or Perilous?

Do you find the idea of being the first to do something different alarming, or exciting?

Evolution has made most people risk-averse for good reason: inaction is usually a safe bet, and a wise default. Let someone else be first to go into the dark cave, eat the unfamiliar mushroom, or spear the mammoth. 

Risk aversion is prudent. This is why moving people from inaction to action is so hard. Inertia is powerful. Momentum requires effort.

Still, not all of us are completely risk-averse all of the time. Human appetite for risk has made us our planet’s dominant species, and what has given us the power of ecological self-destruction. 

Homo sapiens isn’t the first species to impact our planetary ecosystem, but our capacity for abstract thought and appetite for risk mean we’re doing in centuries what took slime moulds, plankton, trees etc. millions or billions or years.

If, in the face of global heating, you see climate action as perilous rather than prudent, See Through might not be for you.

Transparency: Prize or Price?

Look at the You Give/You Gain sentences above. 

Do you see them as a calculated transaction, like a standard business tariff?

If so, it might still make sense for you to participate, if your risk/reward calculation comes out positive. 

See Through’s ‘tariff’ is designed to encourage such calculations, but if your first instinct is to make them, it diminishes the likelihood of See Through being a good fit for you.

If, on the other hand, you noted that both sides of the give/gain ‘balance sheet’ include words like ‘public’, ‘open-source’, ‘transparent’, ‘publish’ ‘shareable’ etc., and this realisation makes you more inclined to click on the How To Help button, welcome aboard.

This is because, like See Through, you see transparency not as a Problem, but as an essential part of any Solution. 

A prize, not a price.