Dear Trusted Friends,
Welcome to the first issue of what will be a weekly newsletter.
Unless you unsubscribe, the See Through News Newsletter will continue to land directly in your email inbox until:
See Through News runs out of steam, or
Our Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Turning Inactivists Into Activists results in pre-Industrial concentrations of greenhouse gases.
We’re starting to suspect our Goal may take more than a few weeks, so frankly if you’d rather not receive our newsletters, it’s probably best to unsubscribe pronto…
Otherwise, every Sunday henceforth, See Through News will deliver a nourishing meal made from highlights of our previous week’s output. Until you tell us otherwise, we’ll follow this menu:
Appetiser: 500 words (2min) of amusing-but-relevant froth to settle your tummy
Antipasto: 750 words (3min) still frothy, but with more intense flavours.
Main course: 1,500-2,000 (6-10min) of dense, rich sustenance, with challenging sauce
Dessert: Now you’ve done your reading, you can have your 2-minute video
Medley of amuse-gueules: assorted Tweets, Pins, Snapchats etc. from the STN kitchen.
It’s a spiritual version of those posh DIY gourmet meal kits you can get delivered, except it’s free.
And, we hope, it will help speed up carbon drawdown. If you enjoy this newsletter, please let your friends know.
Bon appetit, Robert Stern
editor@seethroughnews.org
Appetiser
Covid: Origin Wars
Species Leap or Lab Cockup?
Much non-scientific attention is being focused on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. What’s the Point?
Part 1 Covid Origin Wars
W.H.O. delegations come and go. Questions are Asked, formally, at the highest levels, to career diplomats, and informally , online, to self-appointment ambassadors. Established Tribes take turns to batter, and then buttress, Beijing’s protestations of innocence. It’s ping pong gone wrong.
Hackles are raised. Egos are bruised. Pride is dented. Online ‘debate’ smoulders away, occasionally, whenever a report is published, a delegation holds a press conference, a memo is leaked, bursting into wildfire. When mainstream media loses interest, citizen journalists leap once more into the breach, happy to beat Old Media to the punch, jabbing away with shreds of evidence intended to incriminate or absolve one side or the other. But shred by shred, each claim refuted, each rebuttal disputed, and so the cycle resumes .
It’s a question that preoccupies, frustrates and angers many people; it certainly consumes considerable resources of time and energy. And you can see why - did the virus that’s so far ended 3 million lives, and turned life for the rest of us upside down, escape from a lab, or did it species-jump ‘naturally’ in a wet market?
As critics point out, it’s not just a matter of jingoistic points-scoring, though that’s what it sounds like most of the time. By finger-pointing, our fingers can pinpoint the exact origin, which may just make a different next time.
Well, it may make a difference or it may not, because there are so many different ways a novel coronavirus can emerge. Just because a lab leak/wet market leap was/wasn’t true of SARS-Covid-2, doesn’t mean it was/wasn’t true of the 2003 SARS, any more than it will/won’t be true of the next one that will inevitably come along before too long. In which case, one might ask - and here I am asking it - why all the fuss?
All but the darkest conspiracy theorists agree it was an accident. China’s secret virology labs were doing their best to monitor and identify any new strain, and someone screwed up but they won’t admit it. If, for some reason, you’re so sure it couldn’t possibly have been a wet market species-jump, what’s the alternative? That Beijing deliberately decided to lock itself down, stall its economy for months on end, and infect the entire world so that...what?
This is often where the conspiracy theorists run out of steam a bit, when they have to explain how exactly ‘they’ are benefitting from the ‘plandemic’ in any specific, forecastable way.
I have a different question - why waste so much time and energy on answering a question that’s:
probably unanswerable
definitely un-urgent.
Nothing wrong with discovering the truth, of course. This is just a gentle query wondering whether, in the middle of a global emergency, this long-running franchise of COVID: Origin Wars is a particularly useful deployment of scarce resources - in particular, diplomatic energy and goodwill.
Like most internet ‘debaters’, the Covid Origin Hunters split into two polarized tribes with mutually incompatible stances. In this case:
Tribe Pangolin/Bat consists mainly of Tribe People’s Republic of China, public health officials concerned about the planning for the next outbreak, plus some Conspiracy Theorists
Tribe Lab Escape largely contains Tribe China-Bashers, investigative journalists, plus some other Conspiracy Theorists.
In the vast, desolate middle ground separating these warring tribes, a few scientists scurry back and forth, bravely attempting to carefully examine the ground and take samples, all the while dodging and ducking the spears, arrows and abuse flying overhead.
In Part 2 I’ll look at how the New World Order is shaping public debate about just about everything. Needless to say, I’ll be switching metaphors for The Waterlogged Boxing Ring. By Part 4, you’ll have discovered why See Through News thinks our Covid response is such an important indicator, good or ill, of our prospects of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown.
Antipasto
Research Project: Wombling Free
See Through News is offering any, or many, universities, a unique, ready-made, immediately deployable, data-rich case study for research into the transition from Sustainable Inactivism to Activism, with regard to Litter-Picking.
Wombling Free is a Facebook-based project that motivates local citizens to pick up bags of litter from their communities, like the eponymous 1970s UK childrens’ TV creatures after which they’re named.
Each successful litter-picking trip concludes with the trash-collecting Activist posting a photo of their haul of rubbish bags with a geolocator tag.
This data is then entered online on a local map, marked by a Womble, together with the number of bags collected.
There appear to be no downsides to this project. Reported benefits so far include:
Recruiting New Activists: new litter pickers are being created
Boosting Old Activists: veteran litter pickers pick more litter, convert more Inactivists, get organized, take next step to lobby local council.
Individual Health: Longer walks due to increased motivation.
Raising Awareness: paying more attention to degraded environment old activists, new activists and their family.
Apolitical Activism: Litter-picking does not fall neatly into any identity politics, and no one opposes it, meaning potential demographic is Everyone.
Personal validation: feeling part of something bigger increases the satisfaction individuals gain from their Activism
Community status: both online and real-world, Activists are highly motivated to have their hauls swiftly and accurately tagged and uploaded.
Multiplier Effect: this project has already made a discernible difference to the countryside and streets in high-Activity areas, promoting more Activism.
Collective Goodwill
Evidence in the form of hard data that can be presented to Rulemakers like local councils, identifying litter hotspots, volume, main source of litter etc.
Competition. Providing individual and collective benchmarks motivates internal and external (friendly) rivalry, boosting Effectiveness. Activism and Recruitment.
And, let’s not forget, less crap out there.
More details of positive user feedback, can be found in this user poll the creator Oliver Swann conducted a month after launch.
This pilot scheme has already been up and running for a month in Cumbria. Daily updated results can be seen here. At the time of writing, dozens of volunteer pickers from the Eden Valley area have reported picking up nearly 300 bags of rubbish in four weeks, and competing groups with different geographic/tribal identities have spontaneously formed on the borders of the pilot area. So far each post has been manually located on the map, but this is easy to automate.
See Through News has been granted the creator’s permission to use and adapt this prototype for research purposes, so long as the data collection is hosted by See Through News Facebook Groups, and the methodology and results are open source.
STN is still in a pilot stage itself, but has established a Content Delivery Architecture that’s ideal for administering this scheme at local, county, regional and even international levels.
As it grows, STN will also be able to drive new potential research subjects to the Wombling Free project, and is prepared to share social media engagement data for research purposes.
The Cumbria Pilot Scheme has already proved itself highly effective in removing hundreds of bags of litter from the environment, but a revised, more structured version, designed in collaboration with one or more universities would be well Bisto, providing powerful, granular and rich data.
Wombling Free is highly scalable, flexible, adaptable and repeatable. Married to STN’s CDA, which is flexible enough to accommodate any number of local projects in the UK, or indeed overseas too, this is a ready-made, Trash-Grabber-ready project that could be implemented with no delay.
STN will implement the scheme locally in Salisbury, Wiltshire area shortly anyway, but would like to offer universities the chance to participate, and collaborate in making the most of the potential of the datasets this scheme could generate. Our only condition is that the results are open source.
(Please also note that STN’s non-profit, independent status means it moves very quickly, unencumbered by Gatekeepers and Purseholders, so funding would have to be in place, or the work done pro bono).
Possible adaptations to the Pilot Scheme that would reap even richer and more valuable datasets could include:
A more nuanced hierarchy of Womble Awards. Baby Wombles for Under-16s, Uncle Bulgaria Wombles for 10+ bags in a day. Tobermory Wombles for ingenious recycling etc. A/B testing could reveal how effective such gimmicks are in promoting activism.
Dynamically updated league tables. With so many sports clubs still locked down, local five-a-side/badminton/squash/table-tennis clubs etc could substitute Wombling Rambles as a Covid-Safe and Environmentally Sustainable form of local rivalry and gentle competition.
Litter Content Analysis for Monitoring and Benchmarking. As well as geolocators for the start and end points of their walks, litter-pickers could estimate the breakdown of their hauls - the rough percentage of fast-food packaging, crisp packets, aluminimum cans, plastic bottles etc. This data, fed back by the project in shareable form, could then provide evidence and motivations for direct lobbying of local councils to prosecute litterers/takeaways, and elevate litter-pickers into higher-level forms of activism.
Expanding Activism through Existing Non-Activist Networks Litter is the least politicised of all Sustainable initiatives, so tracking engagement and participation with Facebook and other social media Analytics could provide measurable evidence of the effectiveness of different paths and journeys from Inactivism to Activism.
If you’re interested in such a collaboration, or in learning more, please contact us, if you’re happy that any collaboration would have to be open source and any data collected non-proprietary.
Main course
Help Us Stop ‘Saving the Planet’!
Why a little humility might be just the ticket to get back on track.
The See Through Trick Questions
Another round of elections, another round of politicians saying they want to Save the Planet. Day by day, hour by hour, another primary school starts an inspiring project to Save the Planet, another corporation runs an ad showcasing its efforts to help Save the Planet, another community group starts litter-picking, recycling, repairing, swapping or sharing to help Save the Planet. So why is See Through News so grumpy about people wanting to Save the Planet? Why are we encouraging you to ask our leaders, be they Prime Ministers, bosses or teachers, these two See Through Trick Questions (though if we say they’re trick questions, we’re unsure they can be):
See Through Trick Question 1 Do you think we should Save the Planet? See Through Trick Question 2 What’s wrong with Q1?
We encourage you to use your own words, but our model answers are:
A1 I don’t understand your question. What do you mean by ‘Saving the Planet’? A2 Ah, I see. Don’t worry about the planet - she’s fine. It’s us who need saving.
Mass Extinctions Get You Extra Marks
For extra marks and an A*, mention any of the Planet’s 5 previous Mass Extinction events. The volume of accumulated scientific evidence means primary school kids should by now be able to recite these as easily as ABC, but we suspect considerably more people can name 5 Beatles songs containing girl’s names.
To be clear, we’re not saying Beatles trivia is trivial, just that understanding the differences between ‘planet’, ‘Earth’, ‘Life’, ‘biome’, ‘homo sapiens’ and ‘us’ are more important.
So in case you’re a bit hazy on distinguishing yer Permians from yer Ordovicians, here’s a handy cheat sheet.
And here’s our gloss on it.
The Planet’s Top Five Mass Extinctions - As They Happened
#1 Ordovician. 450M years ago, just when multicellular life was getting in the groove, 65% of all species disappeared forever. Probably an Ice Age wot done it.
#2 Devonian. Roll on 90M years or so and 75% of the survivors plus all the new species that had evolved since - poof! Done for by a drastic drop in oxygen levels .
#3 Permian. Another 100M years later, the GOAT - Greatest Of All Time. 95% of all species went in this timeless classic. Almost certainly an asteroid impact.
#4 Triassic. 50M years was all those survivors had to evolve and fill out our family bush, before 75% of them were lost forever. Volcanoes, probs.
#5 Cretaceous. 66M years ago nearly all the dinosaurs were among the 75% of all species who’d made it that far, but no further. Asteroids again.
Which brings us neatly onto the Planet’s 6th and current Mass Extinction. With typical vanity, though for once with exemplary clarity, we’ve named this one after ourselves - the Anthropocene.
Actually, we may not have technically qualified yet, as there’s some debate over whether we’ve passed the 50% requirement to enter the Mass Extinction Super League. Calling Mass Extinctions in-play is a mug’s game - there’s a theoretical chance that If we all pull our fingers out right now, we might never even qualify.
But if we don’t, we have a genuine shot at the Permian’s all-time record, which has stood for 252M years, and has long been considered untouchable. Mind you, they said that about Bob Beamon’s altitude-assisted long jump record in the Mexico Olympics, and that didn’t even last 23 years.
So beating 95% is definitely on the cards. Now over to our pitch-side interview, with all the latest on our chances of making the Super League...
Right now the lads are focused on taking it one species at a time, but we’ve all got dreams and never say never. They said Arsenal could never go a season undefeated, but now they’re The Invincibles. I tell the lads to think the unthinkable, dream the impossible dream - why not wipe out 100% of life on Earth?
Apologies if the climatically woke find such jaunty sports analogy facile, but communicating the reality, scale and urgency of the existential problem facing human civilization is precisely the business See Through News has chosen to be in.
As we’re discovering, delivering Inconvenient Truths is rarely pleasant - there’s really not a nice way of telling the truth. The Anthropocene is tragic not because Mass Extinctions are new, but because this is the first not to be caused by an asteroid, volcano or Ice Age. This time a single living species, which we’ve named, rather ironically, homo sapiens or ‘wise man’, is responsible, and in some style.
Previous Mass Extinctions have unfolded over millions of years, but we’ve gone from 100% to 50% in the last 150 years. Wise man was actually acting pretty wisely until we discovered a brilliant energy short cut, involving burning coal. Of course we didn’t know the consequences at the time, any more than we knew our population would growfrom 1.2Bn to 7.5Bn.
The double-dose of good news is a) not only do we know now, but b) it’s in our power to reverse Global Heating, using all the technology we’ve developed since the Thomas Newcomen and James Watt’s innovations changed everything.
And if you still think things can’t really be all that bad, you’re actually right. It’s still in play, so we can’t give you the final stats.
Mother Earth, 4.5Bn years old, can be forgiven for not quite keeping track of all the details, what with her age and everything. And when you consider that for her first billion years there was no life at all, and that even now she’s basically 100% rock, with the percentage of the tiny biome crust only apparent when you start adding decimal points, maybe you’ll start to agree with the short version of our A2 answer.
Still, even with all this geological context, you might reasonably consider A1 and A2 clever-cloggy, nitpicking, pedantic, carping or bleating. If so, we’ve still not made our point, and hope you read on.
If you're thinking it’s not about us, but all the innocent biodiversity we’re destroying, you’re half-way to understanding our point, but this isn’t why ‘Saving the Planet’ so irks us at See Through News. You see, we believe our nitpicking exposes a fundamental and critical problem in the way we’re addressing the Climate Crisis.
‘Saving the Planet’ betrays a mindset that impedes our Goal, which is:
To Speed Up Carbon Drawdown by Turning Inactivists into Activists
That’s why we get a bit narked when people talk about Saving the Planet. It gets in the way. Our Point is subtle. It’s quite literally the difference between being sophistic and sophisticated. But it is, we believe, Important, which is why our Mission is to educate people into Carbon Drawdown Activism, and why our key demographic is all Inactivists, which is pretty much Everybody.
And to reach Everybody, you’ll need more than one way of communicating. A wordy 2,000-word article like this may not be the best way to make our Point to everyone. But if you’ve read this far, it is for you.
Our See Through Pub Crawl (STPC) method of facilitating and tracking the journey from carbon drawdown Inactivity to Activity, is designed differently for different people. If you’re read this far, you’re comfortable with words. For those of a more visual bent, we’re making the same Point in the form of a home-made, Insta-friendly T-shirt (subscribe if you want to see how that turns out…).
That’s why we bang on a lot about how different governments are responding to the Covid Pandemic. Covid is a perfect - the religiously-inclined might claim ‘heaven-sent’- metaphor, litmus test and training exercise for our response to the Climate Crisis. And STN addresses both in every form its resources permit, be it a 7-part series of solemn, fact-rich essays, or a 2-minute viral video involving dressing up in a silly hat (you really do want to subscribe for that one - it’s going to be a cracker).
When your core demographic is Everybody, there are a lot of bases to cover. See Through News seeks to provide an emotionally-satisfying path for everyone to get from Inactivity to Activity. We just hope that, along the way, the serious don’t mistake humour for trivialisation, and the light-hearted don’t feel bludgeoned by 7-part essay series, though not doubt some will.
We can’t win ‘em all, but on the other hand we may only need to win 3.5% of them all.
Take this article. Because it’s placed at the apex of the See Through Content Delivery Architecture (i.e. ‘last stop of the Pub Crawl’), our See Through Universal Nugget Tagging System (STUNTS) algorithm predicts a fews things about you.
Using the same methodology used by Amazon, YouTube and Netflix when they suggest ‘if you liked x, you might like y), STUNTS predicts:
You’re either on the cusp of turning from Inactive to Active in Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown, or have already done so.
You’ve been correctly categorized as susceptible to Teacher or Expert content in the 4-tier taxonomy (expressed, maybe foolishly, as Student/Beginner/Teacher/Expert), which forms Step 2 (Language Complexity) of STUNTS’s 5-Step pigeon-holing process.
You’re an Expert, who knows the difference between sophistic and sophisticated (respect! We had to look it up!)
You’re an Expert prepared to look up the difference to make quite sure you precisely understand our point.
You’re a Teacher, undeterred by such lexicological peccadillos, who gets the gist, and ploughs ahead (though if you just looked up ‘lexicological’ or ‘peccadillo’ you’re actually an Expert - see b)
Annoying/creepy, isn’t it, Big Data? We like to think we’re immune from any crude categorization by algorithms coded by Silicon Valley nerds. Being told ‘you’re reacting exactly as we predicted’ and ‘if you’re reading this we know you must be x or y’ is either bloody annoying, if you don’t understand Data Science, or bloody creepy, if you do.
Either way, we all believe we have free will and are impervious to monitoring, let alone manipulation, by algorithm. Like doctors denying they’re ill, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos probably believe themselves immune. But if we really were algorithm-proof, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Netflix would be California corner shops, not global giants.
Nor would our Climate Crisis be so critical.
Tell us what you think we want, to buy more stuff, like our Silicon Valley Overlords, and you’re Slowing Down Carbon Drawdown.
Tell us what you think we need, to improve the odds of our civilisation’s short-term survival, like responsible journalists and politicians, and you’re Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown.
Fortunately, STUNTS can use the same machine learning and neuroscientific insights that get us to buy more stuff, to Speed Up Carbon Drawdown. Like the Internet and gene editing, indeed like all technology, data science is neither good nor evil. You can use a hammer to tap in the final peg of a zero-carbon eco-lodge, or to smash in a stranger’s skull. It’s just a tool.
We hope all this helps explain why here at See Through News we get a bit shirty (even T-shirty) about Saving the Planet.
It’s not pedantry; conflating the fate of our planet with that of our species is, ironically, a perfect illustration of the very hubris that caused our Climate Crisis in the first place. It’s all me me me with us humans.
So we hope that next time you hear yourself, or someone else, say ‘Saving the Planet’, you pause a moment. Maybe even correct yourself, or whoever said it (gently is fine, no need to shout or score points). Try substituting ‘Saving Human Civilisation’. Does that alter the tone of the discussion a tad? Bit less pompous, bit more practical?
So please try the our Trick Questions on the next politician, boss or teacher you hear say ‘Save the Planet’. No matter if you’re an ordinary citizen, or Emily Maitlis, nor if you’re addressing the postman, or the Prime Minister. We’ve found it to be a highly effective greenwashing litmus test, instantly revealing how deeply the person who’s just claimed to be ‘Saving the Planet’ has actually thought about the reasons why it needs saving, and what we need to do to save it.
Whether they twist in the wind or give our model answers, congratulations, and thank you.
By asking the See Through Trick Questions, you’ve just become Active in Speeding up Carbon Drawdown.
Dessert Well done for making it this far. Time for a treat. Hard to choose from all our video content, but here are a couple. Plenty more if you subscribe to the See Through News YouTube channel.
Oh, go on, another one then. This one attempts to explain the secrets of our Silicon Valley Overlords, substituting tennis balls for jargon.
Medley of amuse-gueules
You’ll find @seethroughnews all over social media these days. Here’s a small selection from the past few days activity on Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn.