See Through News’s series of branded indices designed to both reflect current views of effective climate action, and nudge them in a more effective direction that will actually reduce carbon.

This project is a key tool to achieve our Goal of speeding up carbon drawdown, and measurably reduce carbon.

The See Through News Climate Action Indices will both be an objective, neutral reflection of current public perceptions of what constitutes effective climate action, and a means to use these perceptions to deploy evidence-based commentary, context, and framing, that will nudge these perceptions towards a more effective understanding – and practice – of climate action.

Thus, these Indices act both as benchmarks of current perceptions – to put is more cynically, indicators of the success of current greenwashing efforts – and an opportunity to re-frame public debate in a way that will influence changes in government regulation and enforcement, in a direction that will measurably reduce carbon.

Benchmarking Current Perceptions

The database created by the See Through Games Think Game will provide a basis for creating a series of targeted ranking tables – think of them as naming and shaming rankings – for countries, celebrities, brands and institutions.

We can generate, and update, a series of branded Top and Bottom Five rankings, for example:

• Best/Worst Supermarkets
• Best/Worst Charities
• Best/Worst Airlines
• Best/Worst Political Leaders
• etc.

While these would be a neutral reflection of public perceptions, we’ve found that listing them like this, and asking people to give their assessments of their green credentials, provokes a desire to know the ‘right’ answers.

Which provides an opportunity to…

Nudging Current Perceptions

Sidebars, quotes, data, evidence etc. accompanying these rankings can re-frame them in the context of providing greenwash-busting evidence to support or refute the public assessment of these rankings.

Using evidence, for example from Project Drawdown’s Table of Solutions, we can give See Through News’s own assessment on whether these public assessments are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Over time, in order to rise up the rankings from Worst Five to Best Five, brands, people, countries or institutions would have to take action.

In the short term, they might conclude they need to beef up their greenwashing, but as the realities of the consequences of human-induced global heating become more irrefutable, over time our hope is that they’ll come to the conclusion they need to:

• take action to measurably reduce carbon
• better communicate their actions in order to distinguish they brands from their competitors

This virtuous circle would be nudged by STN’s own social media network, essentially a fun online course in greenwash bullshit detection.

The Purpose of the STN Climate Action Indices

The creation, updating, and expansion of these series of branded indices will enable See Through News to:

• measurably reduce carbon
• have the capacity to compare the efficacy of our different approaches with different demographics, with a high degree of granularity
• assess he effectiveness of third-party projects and interventions in promoting effective climate action

Target the Unwilling Inactivists

As laid out in See Through News’s own taxonomy of our target demographic, and in common with most of our project, these STN climate action indices would primarily be aimed at what we term the Unwilling Inactivists.

These are the vast majority of people, who accept the science behind human-induced global heating, acknowledge the reality of it now being reflected in headlines about ‘natural’ disasters, and are no longer taken in by the more overt greenwashing efforts of those benefitting from the status quo of climate inaction, but who feel impotent.

In combination with our other projects designed to empower unwilling inactivists into effective climate action, and the efforts of other effective climate activists, have the potential to both speed up carbon drawdown directly, and provide useful evidence for better targeting future efforts.