A pithy condensation of the See Through Methodology

1 Wealth

When we met as tiny dots on a vast plain, 

We liked to swap two Things.

Thing One – Stuff: fish, hides, sharp stones.

Thing Two – Tales: myth, jokes, smart yarns.

2 Money

Then came Thing Three – Cash: shells, coins, notes.

The more Stuff, Tales and Cash we swapped, the more we thrived.

We formed big groups.

But still liked all three Things.

3 Fossil Fuels & The Attention Economy

We found black stuff, burned it, out-pulled horses, thrived more.

Thing Three made more Thing One, we formed one huge group.

But we still liked Thing Two.

So now swapped Thing Four: eyes and ears.

4 Oops

We grew rich with all four Things. 

Our richest from Things Three and Four.

Then smart folk found burnt black stuff makes us drown, burn and shrivel.

We march toward a chasm. If we fall in, we all lose everyThing.

5 See Through

Some folk want to steer us from the chasm, to stay rich in Thing One.

They’re rich in Thing Two, have no Thing Three, and use Thing Four.

Worth a try?

The See Through News Goal is ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’. To join our global network swapping their Thing One, Thing Two, and Thing Four wealth to measurably reduce black stuff in the air, email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org

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If you reckon less is more, or you completely get More Than One Way To Be Rich first time round, stop reading.

What follows is for anyone who’s intrigued by what this fable has to do with See Through’s Goal of measurable carbon reduction but can’t quite put their finger on its specific ‘lesson’.

What follows is an expansion on the sparse vocabulary More Than One Way To Be Rich uses, some background on what inspired it, and links to other articles that further explore the issues it raises.

Exegesis/Glossary

Here’s what lies behind the 181, almost entirely monosyllabic, words of More Than One Way To Be Rich.

1 Wealth

• We: Homo sapiens
• tiny dots on a vast plain: hunter-gatherers, i.e. the first 97% of Homo sapiens history
• swap: barter, we still do this at home (‘eat your greens and you can have pudding’, ‘I’ll wash, you dry’, ‘I’ll buy you a diamond ring, my friend, if it makes you feel all right’).  
• Stuff: real-world objects with real-world value for preserving the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
• Tales: myths, legends, whether true, embellished or invented. Sparsely distributed nomadic cultures, like Mongolia’s, have particularly refined tariffs for exchanging hospitality for novel stories, but all cultures still value a good story, c.f. Hollywood.

2 Money

• Cash the invention of tokens that mediate barter, and separate transactions in time and space. See Debt: the First 5,000 Years , by David Graeber (Melville House, 2011), from  store of value tokens like shells to representative money, like dollar bills.
• Formed big groups: agriculture leading to civilisation.

3 Fossil Fuels & The Attention Economy

• black stuff: fossil fuels: coal, oil, gas. Crushed, old trees and plants.
• Out-pulled horses: The Industrial Revolution, specifically the invention of the internal combustion engine, replacing human and animal labour with machines.
• one huge group: globalisation
• eyes and ears: broadly, the Attention Economy, or monetisation of data mined from online behaviour. The business model of any ‘free’ service. 

4 Oops

• smart folk found:The Greenhouse Effect. Global Heating, previously known as Global Warming.
• burnt black stuff: the transfer of carbon from ground to air via the combustion of coal, oil and gas.
• makes us drown, burn and shrivel: unpredictable weather patterns outside of historic norms, resulting from human-induced climate change.
• march towards a chasm: see A Bit of a Stretch

5 See Through

• Some folk: See Through’s global network of pro bono experts.  See Through News for journalistic/activist approach,  See Through Carbon for an accurate, free, open and transparent carbon reporting ecosystem, See Through Together for eyeball-collecting content, See Through Games for online gamification.
• have no Thing Three, use Thing Four: See Through’s methodology to leverage the free infrastructure of social media giants like Facebook’s Groups to nudge ordinary people into action that measurably reduces carbon.

The Story Behind the Story

More Then One Way To Be Rich describes how See Through’s global network of expert storytellers re-frame urgent climate action to certain audiences.

Despite only having invented debt  5,000 years ago, modern human civilization has come to value something we made up (money) over something we’ve been made of (carbon) for our 300,000 year existence, in an eco-system billions of years old.

See Through news has written extensively on the problem with using money as an intermediary for carbon reduction, and concluded that it’s worth trying to do the latter without involving the former.

Three things distinguish the See Through approach from most other climate action groups. 

Barter, not bank accounts

Thing One, barter, is the oldest form of human transaction. 

It requires no intermediary tokens (Thing Three), only a shared tariff of the relative value of two objects:

• my sharp stone is worth two of your hides
• That hide is worth ten fish
• A big fish is worth five small fish
• My tribe has more cattle than yours

Thing One has not gone away, but as money has become more dominant in human society, barter has receded from our eyeline to the point of invisibility, to the point that we seem to forget that we still do it every day.

Money has become our dominant way of evaluating different things:

• My country’s GDP is bigger than yours
• This Silicon Valley Overlord is richer than that Silicon Valley Overlord
• My watch is more expensive than yours

Money’s success in displacing barter as our standard unit has occluded any other metric, but that doesn’t mean others aren’t available. Including Thing One, barter. 

Thing Three is a seductively convenient, standardised way of comparing apples and oranges to determin who’s rich and who’s not so rich. So far as we know, Thing Three is a uniquely human lubricant for inter-species social interaction, if you discount the mating displays of bowerbirds and puffer fish, who assess richness in their own way.

But as bowerbirds and puffer fish show us, you don’t need Thing Three as an intermediary for the exchange of certain types of things, like love or carbon reduction.

Love and Carbon

Take Love first.

Thing Three may be able to buy it, depending on your definition.

But it’s not the only currency your can use. Whatever your definition of love may be, Thing One must have been able to ‘buy’ it for the 295,000 years of human existence before we dreamed up Thing Three.

By any definition of Love, Thing Two can be used to trade for it. Just look at all human literature. As Roxanne discovered, to be rich in stories is to be rich in love.

If not love, why not carbon reduction? 

For thirty years, carbon trading has attempted to swap carbon reduction for money. To date, it has comprehensively failed to even slow down carbon emissions, let alone reduce them.

Yet carbon trading has made many very rich in Thing Three. Even those who still believe, against three decades of evidence to the contrary, that carbon trading can be tweaked to generate outputs other than a trillion-dollar-industry, should welcome an alternative approach, like See Through Carbon’s, that dispenses with money altogether.

At best, Thing Three is a big distraction when it comes to reduction greenhouse gas emissions. At worst, it corrupts and diminishes any efforts to trade it for money. 

Metrics

If we’re abandoning Thing Three, as expressed in dollars, euros, yen, pounds, Bitcoin etc. , as our transactional lubricant, and sole metric for who’s rich and who’s not, what unit should we use to quantify, measure and evaluate carbon reduction?

How about the same unit that climate scientists use, i.e. metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered (‘CO2e’)? 

This, not funds raised, social media followers or video views, is the metric See Through uses to evaluate the effectiveness of its activities. 

For all the volunteers in the See Through network, it seems strange for anyone to have even considered using anything else. 

If your goal is to breathe, why buy anything other than air? Why evaluate being rich in one thing that’s unrelated to the richness in question?

If this seems obvious, it’s not.  See Through knows this, because it’s often asked (usually rhetorically) the following three questions:

• The Public: Who would be motivated by See Through content to take carbon-reducing action?
• Volunteers: Why would any individual contribute their expertise without being paid in Thing Three?
• Carbon Reporting: Why would any business trade in anything other than Thing Three?

Anyone asking such questions finds it hard to imagine how a non-Thing Three output might be possible without a non-Thing Three input. This narrow definition of how to measure richness is so widespread, it’s easy to take for granted.

The fact that anyone asking such questions doesn’t know the answers is a testament to the scale of the challenge that humanity faces to wean itself off its fossil fuel addiction.

For the record, the answer to all three questions is.

Volunteer motivation for this transaction is not mediated by Thing Three – it’s a Thing One barter deal. 

• Ordinary people swap their Thing Four for See Through’s Thing Two. The output is measured in CO2e.
• See Through volunteers  swap Thing One Stuff (time, expertise, cloud computing etc.) for Thing Two Tales. The output is measured in CO2e.
• Businesses participating in See Through Carbon swap publicly reporting their accurate carbon footprint with complying with government regulation, and Thing Two tales. The output is measured in CO2e.

So what is this precious Thing Two commodity that See Through is ‘banking’ on to measurably reduce carbon?

Like any Thing Two Tale, it’s a story. 

Specifically, when it comes to climate change, it’s The Best Story. 

The one where you’re the hero, you’re rich in something that’s universally valued, and others wish they could have what you have.

Priceless.

Further Reading

If you want to know more, and favour hard science over metaphorical allusion, here are some articles expanding on these issues in more detail. Rich detail.

They’re not written for children, but neither are they addressed at experts. They contain plenty of verifiable references, but are written in clear, lively language targeted at interested, intelligent novices.

Technical/Methodological

• Carbon Auditing Basics
• Why Current Carbon Auditing Fails
• The 70% of business emissions we don’t currently measure
• To Reduce Carbon Emissions, First Agree On How to Measure Them
• Carbon Consulting for SMEs – Good Enough and Better Than Nothing

Storytelling/Presentation

• How To Banish Greenwash Stains Forever
• Big Business’s Carbon Reporting ‘But’
• Why Carbon Accounting 1.0 is the opioid cure for our carbon addiction
• Carbon Auditing – We Need To Talk About SMEs
• Confessions of a Transport Surveyor – Don’t Mention The C-Word

Legal/Compliance

• EU Carbon Reporting – From ‘Want To’ to ‘Have To’
• When Greenwash Becomes Compliance – Carbon Reporting Has One Trajectory
• A Sceptical Investor’s Guide to the Decarbonisation Business

See Through Carbon’s Ecosystem Solution

• See Through Carbon’s AFOT ecosystem solution
• Carbon Auditing 2.0: Accurate, Free, Open-Source and Transparent
• STC’s Wiltshire/SME Pilot
• STC’s UK/Live Music Pilot

Joining

See Through Carbon‘s innovative carbon reporting ecosystem is accurate, free, open and transparent. And the best story.

Like sibling programmes See Through News, See Through Together and See Through Games, STC is 100% driven by a global network of experts contributing their skills and time pro bono, with the shared Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active

• If you’re interested in helping illustrate, animate or compose music for this parable, or any other of our storytelling programmes from YouTube Shorts to music concerts, articles, or online Games, join See Through’s creative team
• If you’re interested in helping support the network, join our Admin/Management team
• If you’re interested in helping develop, maintain and support the website, databases and integrations behind these programmes, join our IT/Tech team