See Through Carbon’s glossary of commonly-misused words, to help distinguish an ecosystem participant from a commercial customer.
Forward: Language Matters
When describing anything, it’s important to use the correct words, and to make sure the person you’re talking to shares your understanding of that word’s meaning.
Carbon reporting ecosystem See Through Carbon differs significantly from a commercial carbon reporting tool/calculator. This glossary explains some ways in which this difference is reflected in the language and vocabulary See Through Carbon uses.
Words matter. Spot a gap between the intended outgoing meaning as we emit it from our mouth and the resulting incoming meaning as it enters someone else’s ears, and you’ve identified a problem. They come in different forms:
- Speaker error: I say ‘make a 18 inch model of Stonehenge’ when I mean ‘make me an 18 foot model of Stonehenge’. Embarrassment ensues.
- Hearer error: I say ‘damp squib’: you hear ‘damp squid’. Bafflement/hilarity ensues.
- Nuance Gap: ‘I’m a ‘traveller: you’re a ‘tourist’. Sometimes words reveal more about the speaker than what’s being spoken.
This See Through Carbon glossary addresses a different source of misunderstanding – the category error resulting from confusing a commercial business with an open source ecosystem.
Much like financial accounting and carbon accounting, or faux amis French words with different meanings when used by English speakers, similar terms used in different contexts can increase, rather than diminish, understanding. In such cases, misunderstandings can be avoided by using different words.
Here are a few common misunderstandings See Through Carbon has encountered when introducing its ecosystem model to people more familiar with the commercially-driven environment of current models, AKA Carbon Accounting 1.0.
‘Advice’ not ‘Consultancy’
Based on the Pilot participant’s initial baseline report, See Through Carbon’s team of carbon consultant pro bono experts suggest 3 rudimentary Actions, each with an estimated carbon reduction saving.
In their day jobs, these experts take far deeper dives into a client company’s businesses. Typically, they’d spend days forensically researching, analysing, and integrating many different aspects of a business’s operations before coming up with their detailed report of bespoke recommendations. That’s ‘consultancy’.
See Through Carbon, however, only approves advice for actions Pilot participants can take if its administrators consider the applicant too small or insufficiently resourced to afford the level of detailed analysis that comes from paying professional carbon experts. See Through Carbon’s pro bono experts provide their recommendations on the understanding that, while imperfect, the advice they’re giving is ‘good enough’ and ‘better than nothing’.
This is also why See Through Carbon limits the advice to three suggestions. It leaves how to implement them, or indeed calculating the associated financial cost of implementation, up to the participant.
It is hoped that having appreciated the benefits of examining their carbon footprint in detail, businesses will upgrade to a thorough carbon audit with bespoke footprint-reduction consultancy, conducted by these same experts for a professional fee. This ‘consultancy’ will always be more tailored, more detailed, and is likely to include specifics regarding implementation, including available grants, subsidies etc.
See Through Carbon encourages any participant who wants more detail, and can afford it, to hire a professional consultant – ideally one that had volunteered their pro bono services to See Through Carbon
Please note that following the Pilot phase, when See Through Carbon operates at scale and can be used by anyone, this will continue to apply to future advice provided by AI trained on See Through Carbons carbon consultant experts’ suggested Actions.
‘Actions’ not ‘Solutions’
See Through Carbon’s prototype database entry dashboard, displaying a participant entity’s carbon footprint data, describes the pro bono experts’ carbon-reducing suggestions as ‘Actions’, not ‘Solutions’.
Calling this advice a ‘Solution’ risks over-promising and under-delivering. See Through Carbon attaches specific (though estimated) carbon reduction numbers quantifying the relative impact of each Action to reinforce this point.
The mathematical connotation of the word ‘solution’ suggests that if implemented, the business’s carbon footprint might be reduced to zero.
The notion of any business’s carbon footprint – if accurately measured – being zero, is a fantasy encouraged by past ‘voluntary’-era greenwashing, and the misuse of the term ‘net-zero’. For a carbon reporting ecosystem like See Through Carbon, that reports real-world footprints as accurately as current practice permits, such fantasies are best nipped in the bud.
‘Checking’ not ‘Auditing’
For the Pilot stage, See Through Carbon’s team of pro bono expert carbon accountants examine each initial carbon footprint calculation to ensure it reaches a basic level of integrity, before approving it for publication in the database.
This quality control process is designed to avoid obvious mistakes, e.g. blank fields, misplaced decimal points or incorrect units. It is not a forensic confirmation of every value submitted. The would require a much more onerous process of providing supporting documentary evidence. The latter is the job of an ‘audit’.
People accustomed to the rigour modern society applies to financial reporting can find this checking approach ‘lax’, full of loopholes, and vulnerable to being ‘gamed’. In practice, this checking system has a well-established methodology, analogous to that used in self-declared income tax declarations. Tax collectors, for practical reasons, make an initial presumption of good faith data submission, augmented by the implicit ‘threat’ of a forensic audit spot-check.
This concept dates back at least to Jeremy Benthem’s 18th century ‘Panopticon’ concept of prison design, allowing all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single guard, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.
In the case of the See Through Carbon ecosystem Pilot, every single submission is being subjected to a human expert check. Once operating at scale, after the Pilot phase, human experts will continue to spot-check submissions to maintain data integrity, checking both at random, and when automatically alerted to to ‘outlier’ values being submitted that don’t confirm to expected ranges or norms.
Tax-dodging and prison-guard metaphors imply an incentive for participants to ‘cheat’ by submitting erroneous or insufficient data. This is largely not the case when it comes to carbon reporting, for various reasons.
- SMEs who are not yet compelled by law to submit carbon reports have no incentive to lie, and the current ignorance about the GHGP protocol means most businesses wouldn’t even know how to ‘game’ the system. Having not previously calculated their carbon footprint, they lack a baseline from which to measure any attempt to ‘game’ the answer, and in any case have no negative outcomes to incentivise cheating.
- Big businesses now compelled by law to submit accurate carbon reports risk the penalties applied by their regulators, if they fail to report their data accurately. Companies that have previously made greenwashing claims of being ‘carbon neutral’ have created a reputational climbdown for themselves, but one the law will oblige them to make as soon as they’re required to report accurately.
Even regulatory systems that apply a ‘carbon tax’ on big businesses tend to offer some form of carbon credit rebate in return. To encourage compliance, this can often be a 100% rebate, which compliant companies are then free to trade at a profit under ‘cap-and-trade’ carbon trading systems, like the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS).
‘Data Collection’ not ‘Certification’
See Through Carbon prompts a Pilot participant to provide a series of values in response to specific questions about their emissions-generating activities, e.g. ‘Total energy bill last year in kWh’.
Using current best practice, See Through Carbon multiplies the values in the collected data by the most accurate conversion factors available, to calculate the carbon emissions of those activities. This collected data, now expressed in greenhouse gas emissions, is then aggregated into the final ‘carbon footprint’ figure, measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), and published in the See Through Carbon database.
That’s it. The data the participant chooses to send to See Through Carbon and the final carbon amount it reports to regulatory authorities, are its own responsibility. Any ‘certification’ is either done by a third party, like a commercial carbon accounting service, or by the regulator itself.
It’s worth noting that in many cases, there may be a legitimate reason for a participant not to report the entire number as it appears on the See Through Carbon database.
For example, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) only covers goods and services traded within the EU. A multinational trading in multiple jurisdictions is required to separate out different reporting numbers to comply with different reporting regimes in, say, the EU, China, Japan, and Canada.
‘Ecosystem’ not ‘Business’
If businesses are species competing for dominance and limited resources, an ecosystem provides the environment in which species can thrive, and some resources that sustain them, and ultimately enable them to compete.
Examples of ecosystems include Linux, Wikipedia and UN Sustainable Development Goals. Ecosystems are characterised by transparency, being open source, and dynamically responding to outsourced public feedback for improvement.
Like many ecosystems, See Through Carbon is a dispersed organisation. Because it is entirely driven by a global network of pro bono experts, and supported by no-strings donations, it has no need for funding.
A more detailed article explaining ‘ecosystems’ in this context is available on the See Through Carbon website.
‘Participant’ not ‘Customer/Client’
Submitting collected data to See Through Carbon is entirely voluntary, and always free. This makes anyone using its services not a ‘customer’, but a participant.
The logic of an ecosystem is to provide a service that is needed, but lacking, with the goal of empowering a sector, and all the businesses in it, to thrive.
Sometimes commercial services can fulfil this role, sometimes not. For example, different countries at different times have relied on the public provision of water, others have used private companies, others some hybrid system, and some have not involved the state at all. Everyone needs water, but it can be acquired it in different ways.
By providing accurate carbon footprint calculation free at the point of use, See Through Carbon provides a basic data resource, which it then makes public for the public good. Users of the service, by making their data public, are participants in the creation of an ecosystem, rather than customers consuming a service in exchange for money.
‘Pro Bono Experts’ not ‘Volunteers’
Pro bono expert and ‘volunteer’ are functionally equivalent terms, but the difference in nuance is important to emphasize when understanding the role of an ecosystem.
Simply put, the words pro bono expert conjure up an image of gravitas, authority and professionalism -imagine a professor in bow tie, a judge in robes, or a scientist in white coat. The word ‘volunteer’, however, tends to invoke the image of a slapdash student, scatty retiree, or nice-but-useless do-gooder.
Logically, there’s no reason why a Nobel Prize-winner scientist can’t also help paint the village hall, nor why an eminent high-status expert can’t turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth, but that’s the power of nuance and suggestion, and why words matter.
As in this case, confusion can sometimes be caused by using words that focus attention on the package, rather than the content.
Mis-labelling is a powerful storytelling trick used by other parts of the See Through network, but for See Through Carbon’s straightforwardly technical mission, it’s more appropriate to refer to its global network of individuals working without payment to promote measurable carbon reduction as ‘pro bono experts’.
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To join See Through Network, in any capacity, email:
volunteer@seethroughcarbon.org
Or