The Tour de France turns out to be a greenwash-busting rhetorical tool to help climate activists sort visionary leaders from greenwashing followers
Climate activists soon develop greenwash-detection toolkits, but that leaves the problem of nudging climate-hesitant honchos into effective climate leaders. The Tour de France is a handy rhetorical tool not only to separate good guys from time-wasters, but also help business leaders, politicians and other lever-holders, purse-holders and decision-makers feel good about doing the right thing.
The Climate Activist’s Challenge
You might be on a stage, on a video call, at a party, in an elevator or a boardroom.
The meeting might have been months in the making, or you might be grasping an opportunistic moment.
You’re about to address – in public or private -one or more high-status individuals – business bosses, political leaders, funders or influencers.
You have an innovative, practical, functional but as-yet unproven carbon reporting ecosystem, to replace their current ‘carbon policy’.
You know they’re currently greenwashing, but not whether they know it.
Your goal is to move your listener from performative, ineffective climate inaction, to effective, measurable, greenhouse gas reduction.
You both know their safe and easy option is to do nothing.
In fact, you can lip-synch their polished excuses for climate inaction, because you’ve heard them emerge from 99 other pairs of lips.
Your time is limited, your capacity for action constrained. You have passion, tenacity and patience, but want a different answer from this hundredth attempt.
Pleasantries completed, it’s your time to put on a show.
What do you say?
Here’s See Through Carbon’s suggestion for a kick-ass greenwash-busting rhetorical gambit.
It’s not a metaphor, or parable, rather a Sorting Hat that will save both you and your audience a lot of time.
After all, you’re both busy people.
The Tour de France
“Thanks for sparing the time to meet.
We’re all busy people.
You have businesses to run, decisions to make, teams to support, benefactors to satisfy, goals to reach.
Every year, around two hundred of the world’s top cyclists assemble on the starting line of the world’s greatest bike race, the Tour de France.
They too have a race to run, decisions to make, teams to support, benefactors to satisfy, goals to reach.
You might think the goal for those two hundred elite cyclists is simple and obvious – to win the Tour de France.
Unless you understood how the Tour de France actually works.
Loads of people know this truth. Every one of those two-hundred-odd athletes, all the journalists covering it, the millions who line the roads to see their heroes whizz past, and the hundreds of millions who watch them on screens.
Here’s the Tour de France’s truth: only Three Or Four of those two hundred can actually win the race.
The Tour’s 21 stages, some flat, some mountainous, all gruelling, culminating in Paris, will be full of twists, turns, thrills and spills. That’s what makes it such an epic spectacle.
Some years it’s clear from the first few days which of those Three Or Four favourites will win.
Some years it’s not decided until the 21st stage.
But it’s vanishingly unlikely that the victor, in the yellow jersey, holding a champagne bottle atop the podium on the Champs-Élysées, will be anyone other than one of those Three Or Four pre-race favourites.
Tour de France fans can explain the details, but this truth is evident even to the casual viewer who’s never heard of a ‘domestique’, or is unfamiliar with the physics of wind resistance, biology of lung capacity, or mathematics of power-to-weight ratios.
TV commentators constantly mention The Three Or Four, even when they’re hidden in the middle of the ‘peloton’ – the main group of riders.
The other 98% of the riders are constantly glance towards The Three Or Four potential winners, vigilant for the slightest hint they may be about to break away.
When one of The Three Or Four do make a break, sprinting ahead of the pack, things change.
The volume and pitch of the TV commentary rises, the entire peloton is suddenly energised, the roadside spectators start to whoop and cheer, TV audiences shush each other and point at the screen.
How will The Other Two Or Three respond?
- Will they take a short-term view, follow immediately, and chase down their rivals?
- Will they take a medium-term view, bide their time in the peloton, reckoning they have time to overhaul the competition before the end of the stage?
- Will they take a longer-term view, bide their time in the peloton, banking on making their move to the front in the remaining stages, in the mountains or on the flat?
The only certainty is that they must do something in response.
Inaction guarantees failure to win the race. Do nothing, and you forfeit your place on the podium, and retaining your Three or Four status for next year’s Tour.
As for the other 98% of the world’s top cyclists, each has their own decisions. The outcome for them is less glamorous, and certainly less talked about – but just as significant to their own futures.
Whether they follow the leader, join a smaller breakaway group, or stick in the chasing pack, determines their rankings, points, contracts and professional futures.
The nature of the Tour de France may condemn its 98% to always be followers, rather than leaders, but the risks and rewards are clear for each individual member of that 98% .
Do nothing, and you many never take part in the world’s greatest bike race again.
Be too conservative and risk-averse, and you’ll soon fall out of the world’s elite, overtaken by hungrier, more adventurous competitors.
Know when to follow, follow often enough and, follow fast enough, and you may enjoy a long and successful Tour de France career.
Be first to respond, and follow faster than the rest of The 98%, and you might even become one of next year’s Three Or Four.“
The Decision-Makers’s Challenge
For maximum impact, we’d recommend delivering this speech at around 120 words per minute.
That would make this 600-odd-word Tour de France for Dummies explainer take up the first five minutes of your presentation.
Feel free to edit it if you feel that’s too long, or too high-risk. If you’re catching your decision maker in the elevator, or rest room, we’d recommend a severe edit.
Read the room, and respond accordingly. If you have their attention, why not riff on it and stretch it a minute or two longer.
If your audience of busy leaders start checking their phones or glancing at their watches, skip the detail and give them their ‘Executive Summary’, pre-empting their curt demand that you ‘cut to the chase’.
These are busy, important people, with more important things to do than measurably reduce carbon.
But whether your Tour de France schtick becomes a 30-second elevator pitch, or a 30-minute ramble, leave time to put the ball in their court.
Putting the ball in their court
Here’s the punchline to the Tour de France setup that – slipping briefly into tennis metaphor – leaves the ball in their court.
Again, feel free to edit, or expand, depending on the room-vibes, but here’s a 400-odd-word/3min version of the punchline.
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“My question to you is this:
Are you one of The Three Or Four leaders, or one of The 98% followers?
If you’re a leader, please remain in your chairs. Let’s discuss your business participating in See Through Carbon’s carbon reporting ecosystem.
Having robustly interrogated See Through Carbon’s accurate, free, open and transparent alternative to commercial offsetting or carbon trading pitches, you can weigh the pros and cons of being your sector’s first adopter.
You can rationally consider the risk/reward of breaking from the pack, versus sticking with PR-driven ‘carbon neutral’ claims, or not reporting your business’s emissions.
If you’re one of The Three Or Four, you’ll take a strategic view, and objectively balance the security of staying in the peloton against the reputational risk of greenwashing because everyone else greenwashes.
Like any Tour de France cyclist, you can evaluate security in numbers against the potential advantage of making a break.
You can consult your PR and compliance teams before deciding.
They will doubtless advise you that, on the one hand, inaction means avoiding, for the time being, accurately and publicly reporting your business’s real carbon footprint to your colleagues, employees, customers, shareholders and investors.
They may also observe that inaction ramps up your future reputational damage resulting from your inevitable climb-down when new legislation like the CSRD or CBAM requires your business to report your Scope 3 honestly anyway.
Your choice is neither easy nore obvious. That’s why you get the big bucks as a leader.
Do nothing, you might reason, and you can climb down with the rest of the peloton, quietly removing nonsense ‘carbon neutral’ claims from websites, panicking to comply with new regulations, having to find money for consultants from other budgets. Your PR exposure will be diluted by the other 98%. But that’s the logic of the peloton, and you’re one of The Three Or Four.
If you aspire to be on the Tour de France podium, or one of The Three or Four that engage most of the public’s positive attention during the race, you’ll recognise the potential zero-cost advantage participating in See Through Carbon might bring…
On the other hand, if you’re one of The 98% – and statistically, you’re likely to be – apologies for wasting your time. By all means go and do something more important, if you like.
We might talk later, after The Three Or Four have done the leading and claimed the advantage only available, once, to the first mover.
We say ‘might’ because either See Through Carbon might not convince them. Or because by then you’ll no longer be in the race.
None of us wants to waste each other’s time.
We’re all busy people.“
Sales strategy: it’s a numbers game
Sales professionals might recognise this Tour de France gambit as an example of the high-risk/high-return Challenger sales model.
Anyone who’s read the first two chapters of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer will find it familiar (and will have saved themselves the cost of buying a Challenger Sales Model textbook, or attending a Challenger Sales Model course).
The risks of addressing high status business or political leaders in this manner are obvious.
Think of your boss in any business meeting, or the chair of the local council, or a cabinet minister, or a wealthy philanthropist, and imagine how they might respond to this Tour de France challenge.
They might feel ‘manipulated by a cheap trick’, ‘patronised by a silly story’, or have their ‘intelligence insulted by naive idealism’.
Like elite cyclists, people who’ve risen to the top of the pile are generally accustomed to deference. Their statuses as smart, wise, or original thinkers are reinforced by most of the people with whom they spend most of their time.
Who tells business bosses they’re wrong, apart from their grandparents, parents, spouses or children?
How do most people who’ve reached the top of any given entity react to being ‘held to account’, ‘taken to task’, or ‘confronted with home truths’?
They tend to dismiss any challenges to their judgement, wisdom or intelligence.
But note the use of the words generally, most,and tend to.
Such responses may be typical, common, or to be expected from some people, but not from 100% of everybody.
We’d even put a number on it.
98%.
What Do You Have To Lose?
This is the point of this numbers game, this Tour de France story, and of effective activism.
Changing people at scale, doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on the majority.
If it did, there wouldn’t be any online influencers, advertising industry, mass market versions of high fashion brands. Nothing would ever grow, or decline.
From this perspective, why waste your time – and their time – by finding ways to sweeten the pill, diplomatically re-frame, or otherwise pander to the 98% of people who will definitively never be the ones to take the first step.
Let them be offended, alienated, or patronised, and stomp off to attend to more important matters. They’re not your target audience.
Smarter, surely, to focus on the 2% who they’ll end up following.
All hustlers know the first sale is the hardest. ‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’. Inertia is easy. Momentum is hard. Humans are neophobes.
Yet everything isn’t set in stone. Things do move on. The times they are a-changin’.
Huge social movements are initiated by relatively small numbers of people.
Activists who seek hope from ‘the tip of the iceberg’ are actually being unnecessarily pessimistic.
Around 10% of an iceberg is above water. Social historians, however, know it only takes 3.5% of any given population to take to the streets, in order to trigger huge social change via non-violent protest.
That’s pretty close to the proportion of Tour de France competitors who have a chance of glory.
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