Imagine you’re responsible for reducing a business’s carbon emissions. Things change fast, and new ‘solutions’ appear daily – how do you identify the one that will work?

The Shock Of The New

‘Not recognising innovation’ is so recognisable a human characteristic, it’s become a comedy staple: 

• Bob Newhart’s ‘Tobacco’ skit imagined Sir Walter Raleigh selling his American cargo to his sceptical office colleagues (‘Let me get this straight, Walt, you’ve bought eighty tonnes of leaves?’.  
• Mitchell and Webb’s ‘bronze orientation day’ features stone age craftsmen being told their skills will shortly be obsolete. (‘I won’t lie to you, chippers as a breed are going the way of the sabre-toothed tiger’) 
• Knut Naerum’s ‘mediaeval helpdesk’ sketch shows Norwegian monks struggling with the introduction of bound books (‘When you’re used to paper rolls it takes some time to convert to turning the pages of a – ‘beek’?’).

But we only find this funny in retrospect. We know tobacco, bronze and books were huge breakthroughs, so hindsight makes us smart enough to laugh at the idiots who were too dim to see the future. 

There are also sketches about how crazy and deluded ideas that were once taken seriously now appear, like mediaeval medicine or ancient explanations of the origin of the universe, but they’re also only funny because hindsight has proved them wrong.

The key, if course, is to spot the innovations from the duds at the time. 

Fear of the new is a strong survival instinct. Homo sapiens is better than most mammals at overcoming neophobia – our relative risk-taking is partly why our species has become so dominant we’re literally changing our planetary environment. 

But most of the time, playing it safe remains a wise choice. Inertia is our default mode; ‘no one ever got fired for buying IBM’.

Except when that’s no longer true. Then you’re a fool, insisting on knapping flints when your neighbours are using bronze.

How can we tell the difference when it comes to the carbon reporting ‘solutions’ that are meant to address the biggest existential crisis humanity has created?

Showing vs telling

Showing is always better than telling. This gives innovators of physical objects an advantage when it comes to overcoming inertia – look, I can carry more, faster, with my wheeled horse-drawn cart, than you can walking with your burdened donkey. 

This helps explain why technological or ‘product’ innovations tend to spread faster than ideas: tobacco is addictive, bronze-armed warriors defeat those wielding stone axes, literate people form power elites.

But sometimes deliberate suppression of new technology, absence of direct competition, or physical distance can delay even technological innovation for centuries. 

• By restricting guns and gunpowder, the Tokugawa shogunate  retained power via the sword for 250 years. 
• China’s cultural domination can be explained by their use of agricultural innovations like ploughs, yokes, planting in rows and the wheelbarrow for hundreds of years before Europeans caught on.
• Bi Sheng (990–1051) was printing Buddhist sutras with moveable type printing presses nearly 500 years before Gutenberg printed his Bible in Mainz.

Still, in general, abstract ideas – whether religions or scientific discoveries – face more friction than things. 

Just ask Galileo, jailed by the Vatican for his heretic heliocentric view of the solar system 359 years before his jailors admitted he was right.

Like any power-wielders, generations of Popes saw change as a threat, but in 1992 even they had to succumb to reason.

The climate emergency is too urgent, and its impact too immediate, however, to wait that long. 

Most of us feel we have to do something now.  But what? How to sort the druidic incantations from the plough?  

First, you need to see if from the perspective of the power-holders, and tell the right story in the right way.

Status Quo vs FOMO

For those in control, any threat to the status quo is viewed with suspicion. Change brings them much to lose, and little to gain.

But power-holders also know the risks of doing nothing. Publishers have nightmares about being one of their 12 ‘sensible’ colleagues who rejected Harry Potter, ditto for 1960s record labels passing on The Beatles, wealthy Victorian households and gas lighting, and for newspaper publishers now and AI. 

They all face the challenge of balancing their conservative instincts against the risks of being left behind or rendered obsolete, like stone-age flint-knappers at the dawn of the Bronze Age.

Teenagers coined FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. Do you accept the party invitation of the new kid at school, before anyone knows whether they’re cool? 

Governments and multinationals face FOMO too, but with greater consequences. When new ideas come along, do you ignore them, suppress them, control them with money or vioence, or adopt them?

For a real-world challenge, see how you’d respond to See Through Carbon’s carbon reporting ecosystem. 

There are no right or wrong answers, because it’s a real-time experiment. 

We’ll all have to wait and see if See Through Carbon turns out to be just another pipe-dream, or an innovation future comedy writers use to expose our human frailty.

The Emissions Person’s Dilemma

Imagine you’re a business boss, government official, researcher or activist responsible for emissions reduction. In your institution, you’re the Emissions Person.

If you’re in a big entity, you probably have some professional qualifications these days. If you’re a small business owner, carbon reporting is just a new red tape obligation to add to your heavy burden of staying in business.

Let’s assume you know your carbon accounting basics. You’ve developed your own way of patiently explaining to your colleagues the differences between:

• Scope 1: our business’s direct emissions, from our office/factory/store
• Scope 2: our business’s indirect energy emissions from our power bills
• Scope 3: everything else – all the other emissions that wouldn’t have been emitted if we didn’t do what we do, including our share of our supply chain’s emissions

Every day, you’re beset with competing voices:

• Your accounts nag you to minimise your expenditure.
• Your lawyers warn you against the risks of non-compliance with new carbon legislation
• Your purchasing team pass you pitches from consultants, commercial standards, carbon credit traders – selling their services to help you do your job.
• Your PR and comms people fret about the reputational risk of being caught greenwashing, as new carbon offsetting frauds are exposed.

That’s the life of the Emissions Person – a daily struggle to balance these competing demands. 

Mostly, it comes down to money.  As your accountants keep reminding you, you’re a cost centre, making you vulnerable at times of crisis. 

Any brownie points (and performance bonuses) you gain from your lawyers are offset by the complaints from the bean-counters. Your PR people are little help. The carbon offsetting schemes they once displayed prominently have been quietly removed, as journalists expose them as ineffective, or fraudulent.

And no one else even understands your biggest problem.

The SME Paradox

You spend much of your day explaining the ‘SME Paradox’ to your colleagues, in ways they can understand. Once you’ve made clear SME stands for ‘Small and Medium Enterprises’, and have told them the OECD defines this at ‘1-249 employees’, your explanation may go something like this:

• Carbon reporting regulation is getting tighter, with verifiable data replacing guesses.
• Big businesses must now report their Scope 3, which includes their SME supply chain.
• Big businesses can afford to pay carbon experts, but must submit accurate SME data.
• SMEs have that data, but neither they nor their big business clients can afford to pay carbon experts to calculate it.
• To be compliant big businesses need accurate data from SMEs, for whom emissions calculations are neither a legal obligation nor an affordable expense.

So, when you hear a new pitch, what do you do?

• Ignore it, and risk FOMO? 
• Embrace it, and risk…what?

The See Through Carbon Pitch

• See Through Carbon is an innovative carbon reporting ecosystem. 

• See Through Carbon’s ‘accurate, free, open-source, transparent’ carbon data and calculation tool offers businesses free carbon footprint measurement (and carbon-reducing advice) in return for participants making their data public. 

• By creating a public database of consistently-tagged and taxonomised data at scale, See Through Carbon is designed to accelerate decarbonisation, mitigating the world impacts of human-induced climate change.

• The See Through Carbon database, if adopted at scale, would both be a free resource for businesses faced with tightening carbon regulation, and a rich dataset for humans or robots looking for shorter paths to a sustainable future.

• At time of writing, See Through Carbon is still in its pilot phase. You can posit many reasons why it may wither, but money isn’t one of them, as STC is driven entirely by a global network of pro bono experts with the shared goal of measurably reducing carbon.

Much as you think of yourself as a bold and rational decision-maker, moved solely by objective facts, you know your bosses/investors/customers are more followers than leaders. 

You can anticipate that their first question, however concealed in business jargon, will be ‘will we look stupid if we’re the first?’.

To pre-empt such questions, and demonstrate you’ve done your due diligence, what questions should you ask?

Due diligence

The primary purpose of due diligence is to prevent you from looking stupid, or to demonstrate you did what could be done. 

If See Through Carbon passes due diligence, it might be worth hitching your wagon to.

You’ll already have raised an eyebrow at the mention of its ‘free’ service. 

You’re no fool. You know all about the Silicon Valley Overlords’ trick of bartering ‘free’ services for data they can monetise. You can already hear your colleagues saying ‘If the service is free, you’re the product’, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’, or ‘If something seems too good to be true, it usually is’.

Business people and journalists know the first step of the credibility sniff-test: follow the money. The investors’ track record will be your first clue.

But See Through Carbon has no investors. It’s Who We Are page lists the people behind it, but without a dollar figure to match their bios, how can you evaluate their credibility?

The See Through Carbon website Pilot FAQs, and the Money FAQs of its sibling outreach network See Through News both address the network’s zero-budget philosophy. Search the latter’s website for articles about ‘money’ or ‘funding’’, and you find dozens of articles expanding on its theory and practice.

Follow the links, and you even find work-in-progress videos of children explaining it to you. Those might feel patronising, though you can’t find much to disagree with.  

Perusing the See Through Carbon website in more detail, you’re struck by one particularly unusual thing – Memorandums of Understanding between See Through Carbon and commercial companies. 

As an experienced business person, you know an ‘MoU’ is a non-binding, but detailed, legal document between two parties, outlining a shared objective, and detailing their respective contributions to a joint venture to achieve this to mutual benefit.

But MoUs usually contain privileged, commercially sensitive, information, and are treated as strictly confidential. 

You’ve never seen an MoU published on a website before. 

Is this, as See Through Carbon claims, a demonstration of its transparency and a guarantee it’s not a ruse to turn a ‘free’ service into a business, like OpenAI and countless other Silicon Valley ‘services’?

Or something else?

The View From Uganda

One of See Through Carbon’s published MoUs is with a Ugandan carbon consultancy called ‘EALS Consult Uganda Ltd’.

Its adoption of See Through Carbon is quite comprehensive, ranging from promoting STC Pilots in Uganda to developing the IT for the Pilot database and data collection tool.

Another carbon consultancy in Rwanda, JNCAVTC Ltd, signed a similar MoU shortly afterwards.

At this point, you might start role-playing pushing back at your colleagues’ scepticism if you cite African first adopters. You might use elements of the See Through News article Gift Horse Distribution to Rich and Poor’ , or you may simply point them to another MoU with MaterialsInformation Ltd a UK-based hi-tech start up, covering co-development of bleeding-edge knowledge graph database, and access to Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA) material emissions data that would otherwise cost thousands.

You might be reassured – or not – if you knew EALS had recently fed back to STC a series of questions they’d received from Ugandan government officials when trying to explain the See Through Carbon ecosystem to them. 

Most of these questions turn out to be the same as the ones you expect from your colleagues. 

1. Who benefits, how, and to what extent, from the STC project?

2. To whom and where does the Pilot information go to and how will STC use it?

3. How can EALS benefit if See Through Carbon is a zero-budget project?

4. How will the Ugandan government and local community benefit from STC?

5. Does STC have any official government endorsement?

6. How will STC scale up from its Pilot?

7. What support does STC want from governments?

By now you realise most of them are category errors resulting from confusing an ecosystem with a business, but given that for the past 30 years carbon reporting has largely been left to commercial entities serving a trillion-dollar voluntary carbon offsetting market, this is perfectly understandable.

After all your due diligence, you can probably answer these questions yourself, but To help you decide whether to Ignore or Embrace, here are the answers, plus some extras, in the form of FAQs.

Who does the See Through Carbon Ecosystem benefit?

Deployed at scale, the STC database will provide a significant new resource to promote carbon drawdown. Beneficiaries include:

• Big Businesses: STC’s automated, accurate, verifiable Scope 3 reporting allows big businesses to comply with new reporting regulations at zero cost.
• SMEs: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) required by their big business customers to provide data for the latter’s Scope 3 compliance can do so at zero cost. 
• Carbon consultancies: most big businesses outsource their carbon reporting to specialist consultancies, for whom data collection is the most challenging, but least rewarding, of the many services they provide. Using STC’s free data collection service enables them to focus on their specialist skills, i.e. using this data to enhance their carbon reduction proposals. 
• Researchers: the scale, diversity, and degree of detail of STC’s public database will create a unique resource for researchers to discover new opportunities for rapid decarbonisation, especially once historic trends become evident with annual reviews.
• Policy-makers: STC’s database will reveal previously-invisible patterns of behaviour and effectiveness, both via human and algorithmic interrogation. 
• App Developers: STC’s dataset is carefully, consistently taxonomised and tagged, creating an ideal data training set for Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI tools.
• Governments: STC’s database will create a universal, reputable, standardised dataset using consistent methodologies, enabling governments to make evidence-based policy decisions, and track their relative progress against comparable benchmarks.

What data does See Through Carbon collect?

See Through Carbon only collects data required to calculate the participant’s carbon footprint.

It neither asks for nor accepts any 

• Personal data (including personal emails, unless the participant actively consents)
• Payment data
• Financial data 

All this data is made public by default, in the same way that public companies’ annual financial statements are publicly available. 

The only data collected but not published are optional lists of participants’ major customers and suppliers, with approximate percentages of their turnover they represent on a revenue basis (no dollar figures, just percentages).

STC offers this option to help businesses calculate their Scope 3 accurately and automatically. The aggregate figures are published as part of a participant’s Scope 3 footprint, but not the detailed breakdown by supplier/customer, as this may be commercially sensitive. STC will only disclose this breakdown to regulatory authorities conducting an audit, with the participant’s approval.

Who can access the data See Through Carbon collects?

As See Through Carbon is an open-source service, anyone with an internet connection will be free to access its data.

How can See Through Carbon’s data be used?

Deployed at scale, the STC database will provide a significant new resource to help big businesses comply with new reporting regulations, carbon consultants to use accurate data, and researchers/policy-makers/regulators/governments with a valuable new dataset.

Where is See Through Carbon’s data stored?

For the Pilot stage, the data is being stored on See Through’s UK-based host, Krystal. 

At scale, data storage and processing may be distributed for greater efficiency, or to comply with local laws. This could include the Fediverse system and ActivityPub protocol. 

Where local laws require local data storage, STC will comply, though the data will be public by default.

How can people monetise See Through Carbon?

As an ecosystem, See Through Carbon itself isn’t designed to make any money now or in the future.

It is, however, designed to enable, empower, and otherwise facilitate third parties to profit by adopting it.

How will See Through Carbon scale up from its Pilot phase?

In the same way it developed its Pilot phase, i.e.:

Using See Through’s global network of pro bono experts contributing their specialist knowledge, experience and time to the common goal of rapid carbon drawdown.

Is See Through Carbon an ‘official’ certification standard?

No. Certification, and formal verification of carbon reports is the job of governments, regulators and commercial carbon trading schemes, who set their own rules.

The biggest obstacle to meaningful carbon reporting, however, is high quality data throughout the supply chain, replacing guesswork with granular, verifiable data wherever possible. 

See Through Carbon is ‘simply’ a tool that facilitates the collection of this data, especially for complex supply chains. 

What companies, or their outsourced consultants, do with this data when reporting to regulatory authorities is literally their business.

Does See Through Carbon require documentary evidence for verification?

No. All data submitted to the Pilots are checked for anomalies and obvious outlier errors by human experts. STC does not require participants to supply documentary evidence for verification.

If the Pilot human expert checkers spot missing data they’d expect to see, or anomalous data, they’ll clarify with the participant via follow up queries until they’re reasonably satisfied. This process is designed to catch ‘honest’ mistakes of omission, incorrect units, wrongly placed decimal points etc. It’s not a formal audit.

Can’t participants simply lie about their emissions?

Bad actors can try to submit false data, but in the Pilot stage, they are likely to be spotted by STC’s team of human expert checkers. 

As the database scales, such outliers, whether honest mistakes or attempts to ‘game’ the system, will be increasingly obvious to spot both automatically, by statistical analysis, and via human expert spot-checks.  

Government tax collectors use similar methods to evaluate self-reported tax returns, i.e. ‘trust, but occasionally verify’, on the Panopticon principle.

Who funds See Through Carbon?

To date, See Through Carbon has required virtually no funding. Web hosting is paid for by donations from private funders, with ‘no strings attached’. All the other work, technical, IT, AI, outreach, marketing, government relations, methodology, administrative etc., is done by See Through’s global network of pro bono experts, motivated by their shared goal of ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’.

See Through operates on a principle of radical transparency, so any future funding or donations, if required, will be made available for public scrutiny. 

How can governments support See Through Carbon?

By endorsing, recommending and otherwise promoting the adoption of See Through Carbon to their country’s businesses, large and small.

What connection does See Through Carbon have to carbon trading, carbon markets and carbon credits?

None, beyond the fact that carbon markets are based on the same emissions data that See Through Carbon collects.

See Through Carbon offers no endorsement of any particular carbon trading scheme, or even of the concept of carbon markets in general.

It seeks only to provide accurate, free, open-source, transparent data as a starting point to meaningful carbon reduction.

Does See Through Carbon have an educational or outreach role?

Not directly. Education and outreach, though essential, is left to the storytelling specialists at See Through News, See Through Together and See Through Games. 

The See Through Carbon website includes some basic primers to carbon accounting, analysis of the failings of ‘carbon accounting 1.0’, and overviews of compliance issues, but limits their scope to technical matters related to carbon reporting methodologies and outcomes.

Carbon reporting is a new discipline. Basic concepts like Scopes 1/2/3 are unfamiliar to almost everyone, including many big businesses.

What are the risks of not participating in See Through Carbon?

Governments and businesses often embrace carbon trading schemes, commercial or compliance, without a full understanding of the carbon accounting principles underpinning their credibility and integrity.

Because money, finance and markets are familiar, governments and businesses can adopt or invest in commercial applications of carbon credit trading without a full understanding of the carbon accounting principles that form their credibility and guarantee their integrity.

When gaps between the claims of carbon trading and the physical reality are exposed (‘greenwashing’), the reputational damage extends to those who invested in them.

Because See Through Carbon is independent, with no financial interest in carbon trading, its data can be relied on to lend credibility and integrity. Any entity that chooses not to use its free services must explain why, to their customers, investors, employees, stakeholders, children and grandchildren.

Solving the SME Paradox

So you, and your fellow Emissions People, are now fully up to date on the See Through Carbon proposition.

It’s clearly new and different, but then again everyone pitching a new idea says that, so you’ll have to come to your own conclusions about whether it could be the best long-term solution to the SME Paradox of carbon reporting.

There are ‘competing’ projects with the identical aim of solving the SME Paradox, but if you follow the money, they’re tied to businesses. As an Emissions Person you know the constraints, compromises and considerations that entails better than most. 

Still, even if you’re not literally investing in the solution, but only considering adopting its free service, part of your due diligence as a potential ‘participant’ (you now know the ecosystem glossary well enough not to say ‘customer’) is to assess the soundness of See Through Carbon’s business proposition, and make a prudent assessment of their likely longevity.

Most of the pitches for ‘revolutionary’ commercial carbon consulting services you hear betray a gap between the fine words of the ‘mission statements’, and their still being in business in two years being 100% dependent on them making their next funding round, and not joining the majority of start-up failures.

The hard-nosed business reality (and remember you’re a hard-nosed Emissions Person) is that most of the pitches invoke the magic powers of AI. As an Emissions Person with a grasp of computer science fundamentals, you know AI is impotent in the face of the biggest real-world problem – how to persuade all those other hard-nosed business people in your supply chain.

Without the granular, verifiable detail provided by See Through Carbon, AI follows the old computer science adage of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. It’s clever algorithmic guesses are no better than human ones, if they’re not trained on a high quality data training set optimised for AI, like the knowledge graph database See Through Carbon is designing.

But you know your colleagues’ eyes will soon glaze over if you bring database design into it. At this point, they’ll remind you they’re busy people with things to do, and money to make to support your cost centre, so cut to the chase.

Ignore or Embrace?

They’ve put you on the spot. All your due diligence, your carefully-crafted slide deck, and your meticulously-rehearsed presentation, now counts for nothing.

As an Emissions Person, this is literally your job. 

So which is it?

• Ignore it, and risk FOMO? 
• Embrace it, and risk…what?

**

To join See Through’s global network of professionals collaborating pro bono to serve See Through’s Goal of  Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active, email:

volunteer@seethroughnews.org