Trade, Money, Civilisation and Carbon Credits, explained in 199 words for a smart child

1 Trade

When we were tiny dots on a vast plain,

We’d bump into each other and swap stuff: blows, skins, kids, but mainly Tales. 

All Tales make us the Hero. Good Tales were worth more than blows, skins or kids.

2 Money

‘Bout 5 thousand years back, some folk spun a new Tale, and linked it to a Thing.

‘Swap’ is Old, they said. ‘With Tale-Things, you can ‘Buy’ and ‘Sell’.

We still used blows, skins and kids, but now swapped them with rare shells and odd stones.

3 Civilisation

New Things came with better Tales. Rare metal! A piece of paper!

New Thing-Tales bought new stuff: cloth, spices, leaves, slaves.

Tales still made us the heroes.

4 Carbon Credits

When black stuff got hot, some folk said,‘Hear our tale of One-And-Nought Things!’  

At first we bought black stuff with One-And-Nought-Tale-Things.

But no more, as they make you a Villain, not the Hero.

5 The Best Story

Here’s the new Tale – not a Tale-Thing, but an old-time Swap. 

You give us Truth; we give you the Best Tale. 

No black stuff. Your kids will love it. You’re the hero.

See Through Carbon is a new carbon reporting ecosystem. It’s accurate, free, open and transparent. And the Best Story.

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If you reckon less is more, or you get The Best Story completely, stop reading.

What follows is for anyone who’s intrigued by what this simple history has to do with trading in general, and carbon trade in particular, but can’t quite put their finger on its specific ‘lesson’.

Here’s an expansion on the sparse vocabulary The Best Story uses, background on what inspired it, and links to other articles that further investigate the issues it raises.

Exegesis/Glossary

Here’s what lies behind the 199, almost entirely monosyllabic, words of The Best Story.

1 Trade

• We: Homo sapiens
• tiny dots on a vast plain: hunter-gatherers, i.e. the first 97% of Homo sapiens history
• swap stuff: 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’).  
• blows, skins, kids: kill, trade, interbreed.
• Tales: myths, legends, whether true, embellished or invented. 
• Good Tales were worth more than: nomadic cultures, like Mongolia’s, have particularly refined tariffs for exchanging hospitality for novel stories, but all cultures still value a good story.
• Hero: prevailing protagonists embodying virtue.

2 Money

• ‘Bout 5 thousand years back: 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)
• Tale-Things: representative money. These days, money.
• Rare shells and odd gems: examples of early store of value tokens

3 Civilisation

• Rare metal: commodity money. Coins that have intrinsic value.
• A piece of paper!: fiat currency. Tokens with no intrinsic value, based on a promise of redemption, rarely tested in practice.

4 Carbon Credits

• black stuff: fossil fuels: coal, oil, gas. Crushed, old trees and plants.
• got hot: the Industrial Revolution,/The Greenhouse Effect. Global Heating, previously known as Global Warming.
• One-And-Nought Things!: The Digital Revolution.
• One-And-Nought-Tale-Things: carbon credits, carbon offsetting.
• But no more: discrediting of carbon credits and offsetting. The exact timing of its discrediting depends on your familiarity with their methodology and history, and your degree of literal and psychological investment in the trillion-dollar industry it spawned.

5 The Best Story

• the new Tale: See Through Carbon. An innovative free, accurate, open and transparent carbon reporting ecosystem.
• old-time swap: bartering for carbon drawdown

The Story Behind the Story

The Best Story reflects See Through Carbon’s experience in meetings with businesses, and is a simplified expression of common features of such meetings since STC soft-launched its website in September 2023.

By placing where we currently stand with carbon credits in the context of how our species has addressed trade over our 300,000-year existence, The Best Story seeks to frame why STC exists, and contextualise the real-world challenges encountered in boardrooms.

Boardroom Dynamics on Climate Issues

The typical dynamic of such STC/Business meetings can be characterised as a paradigm misalignment, viz:

• STC explains what it is (carbon reporting ecosystem with an enabling database), what it does (measurably reduce carbon), and why it does it (mitigate the worst impacts of human-induced climate change on our civilisation).
• Business bosses sceptically scrutinise STC as if it were a supplicant.

Underlying these meetings is the growing gap between truth and fantasy, in particular between corporate claims regarding their carbon footprints, and physics. Sometimes this cognitive dissonance is acknowledged, sometimes avoided or left implicit.

The resulting inaction tends to be the same either way.

Meaningful engagement with STC’s core message is rare. Corporate rebuttal of STC’s rationale is rarer still. Rarest of all, is for a business to take action to measurably reduce carbon, though exceptions do exist.

Asymmetry

Most business meetings imply a power struggle, with both parties seeking to establish itself as more powerful, occupying higher ground, or demonstrating some other form of asymmetry that gives it greater ‘negotiating power’.

There’s a good reason why a ‘military method’ written by a Chinese general 2,500 years ago, has become a boardroom Bible, generously translated as The Art of War.

Such martial framings are unhelpful when one party is offering a win-win solution, while the other is engaged in a zero-sum negotiation. Indeed, they misrepresent Sunzi’s intentions when he compiled his military manual, much of which is devoted to how to avoid conflict, and always leaving a ‘Golden Bridge’ for your enemy to escape.

No matter the framing, for many business bosses meetings are a battlefield, dojo, or boxing ring. Their mentality is that of a warrior, defending interests, attacking weaknesses, to somehow prevail in a zero-sum context where the victor must vanquish the loser.

Business bosses, maybe out of habit, often bring these attitudes, which presumably serve them well in internal meetings, takeover negotiations, or driving down the price of components, to the issue of carbon reporting.

This is unhelpful, and often impossible to reverse. In the context of carbon reporting the asymmetry is not between customer and supplier, or even between rival suppliers, but between greenwash and reality.

There’s no negotiator more remorseless or implacable than atmospheric physics, not least because Gaia isn’t a negotiator. There’s little point in haggling with a self-regulating planetary ecosystem of which we’re a small, but highly influential component. Now that’s asymmetry for you.

Which side of the table?

All humans should be on the same side of the negotiating table, engaged in rational debate to arrive at an effective, actionable outcome to minimise the worst effects of the fossil fuel we’ve already burnt, and get to a sustainable future as quickly as possible.

Yet in the face of the huge challenge of moving to a sustainable future, we often default to more familiar roles, like pugilists going for a knockout.

Or more politely, rivals vying for control of the narrative steering wheel.

Meetings with STC are almost always initiated by the business. STC makes it clear from the outset that it neither seeks corporate money, nor indeed has a bank account to process it. We’re just fellow-humans looking for the shortest route to inflicting the least self-harm.

Even so, the dynamics, register and tenor of these meetings remains that of a benefactor (the business) indulging a supplicant (STC). Despite not asking for money and offering a product that’s free at the point of delivery, STC is often treated as if it’s pitching for a share of the business’s carbon reporting budget.

Even though they called the meeting, most businesses assume the role of benefactor. The Best Story seeks to clarify it is fact a win-win barter.

This contradiction might be due to:

• Habit: Businesses are not accustomed to asking NGOs for things, but are used to NGOs asking them.
• Toolkit: people whose day jobs require them to minutely value entities in fiat currency lack the tools to evaluate a global network of pro bono experts whose output metric is tonnes of CO2e. 
• Category Error: Businesses are unconvinced by STC’s explanation that it’s an ecosystem created altruistically for mutual benefit, on the models of Linux, Wikipedia, the UN’s SDGs etc., and not a business.
• Evaluation: As they’re unaccustomed to barter, businesses find barter unfamiliar, or are unaware of the nature of the barter transaction being proposed. 

Stability, Gravitas and Credibility

The irony of a volunteer network being treated like a business is not lost on STC. Businesses have legitimate questions about ‘risking’ being the first adopter, but also know the risks of getting left behind.

There’s always a tension between the glory of leading, and the security of following. The vast majority of Tour de France cyclists huddle in the peloton, keeping an eye out for anyone who dares to break away but never initiating a breakaway themselves. This is a good strategy for survival, but a hopeless one for winning. When is comes to corporate carbon reporting, the vast majority of businesses, for reasons that would satisfy their shareholders, stick to the peloton.

But risk-aversion carries a risk too. A generation ago, ‘no one ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a truism. Now you’d get fired for not considering the many rivals who’ve long left IBM in the dust.

The Best Story may or may not convince businesses to re-frame how they view carbon reporting. It definitely won’t work on 100% of big business bosses 100% of the time.

Fortunately, STC doesn’t need to convince 100% of all big businesses.

Firstly, most of STC’s Pilots work directly with SMEs without the need for any big business buy-in. SME owners, while in many ways tougher nuts to crack as they are not yet subject to the same regulatory pressure as big corporations. are much less ‘risk-averse’ when it comes seeking the reassuring comfort blankets of ‘stability’, ‘credibility’ and ‘gravitas’ than their big-business customers.

Secondly, STC only needs to convince one visionary business boss in each sector to ‘risk’ being the first adopter. One in a hundred is fine.

Once this bold cyclist breaks away from the peloton, all still pretending that paying for ‘carbon neutral’ badges based on spurious ‘offsetting’ schemes, the onus shifts to the other 99 to respond. Do they stick with the safety-in-numbers crowd, or decide to follow a different path?

The calculation then changes:

Con

• telling the truth publicly about your actual carbon footprint
• ‘cost’ of adopting a new carbon reporting system

Pro

• telling the truth publicly about your actual carbon footprint
• it’s free

Oh yes. And you now have The Best Story.

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. 

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