Ski resorts slow to deal with climate change
By Greg Hanscom, Pique
When a report warning of global warming’s disastrous impacts on skiing garnered national headlines in December, activists hoped the news would encourage a serious response both at home and in Washington, D.C. But the ski industry itself, where bad press means all the difference between a banner year and a bust, greeted the headlines with all the enthusiasm of a rainstorm on the slopes.
Industry leaders quickly jumped in to do damage control. Vail Resorts ran an ad in the New York Times under the banner, “The Climate HAS CHANGED,” with photos of skiers and snowboarders wallowing in fresh powder at the company’s playgrounds, which include Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Breckenridge in Colorado, as well as three resorts around Lake Tahoe.
The company’s CEO, Rob Katz, wrote a letter to the editor of the Denver Post berating those who “alarm people with images of melting snow.” “Count me in the category of someone who is very worried about climate change,” Katz wrote, and then added, “You can count me out of the group that says we need to address climate change to save skiing.”
Ski resorts don’t like using the C words — climate change. Photo/LTN file
Save wildlife habitat and prevent natural disasters, sure, Katz intoned, but let’s keep skiing out of this.
The reaction revealed an industry deeply torn between protecting its long-term survival and ensuring its short-term profitability. “Ski area owners and operators are aware of the scientific studies and projections regarding the long-term potential impacts of climate change,” the National Ski Areas Association said in a position statement, “but we remain optimistic as an industry.”
The forecast does not inspire confidence, however. The report that made headlines in December, Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United States, provided a long list of alarming reminders: By the end of the century, winter temperatures are projected to warm an additional four to 10 degrees Fahrenheit in North America. In high-emissions scenarios, the winter snowpack in the Cascades and the Sierra is projected to decrease between 40 and 70 per cent by 2050. If we continue to pollute the way we do now, skiing will be confined to the top quarter of Aspen Mountain in average years by the end of the century. Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort will have no snowpack whatsoever.
The report then attempted to put a price tag on all this, calculating that, over the course of the last decade, ski areas lost more than $1 billion in potential revenue to bad snow years. Failure to respond quickly to climate change, the authors wrote, “spells economic devastation for a winter sports industry deeply dependent upon predictable, heavy snowfall.”
Commissioned by the nonprofit Protect Our Winters (POW for short) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the report was part of a broader effort to highlight the economic significance of outdoor recreation, and to use that as a lever to promote conservation. But the ski industry has been reluctant to talk about this looming catastrophe, even for the sake of prolonging its own life.
“It’s a tough reality to swallow,” says Elizabeth Burakowski, a Ph.D. candidate in snow science at the University of New Hampshire and one of the report’s co-authors. “It’s bad for business.”
The National Ski Areas Association does have a program called the Climate Challenge that encourages resorts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — though it says nothing about all the emissions spewed when skiers travel to the resorts — and it has advocated for clean energy programs on the national level. And many individual resorts, including Vail, have cleaned up their operations by shifting to renewables like wind power. But when it comes to the larger fight against climate change, most industry leaders say they have enough to worry about already.
Nationally, the number of visits to ski resorts has remained essentially flat since the industry started keeping track in 1979. Analysts blame younger people, who aren’t replacing aging Baby Boomers, the ski industry’s main market. And now comes the news that snowboarding, a sport largely credited for saving the industry in the 1990s, is on a steep downhill slide. A report released this winter by RRC Associates, a company that tracks winter recreation, found that the percentage of snowboarding visits to ski areas has declined over the past two years, while the number of days boarders head to the mountain has dropped sharply in the past decade.
At Mammoth Mountain, environmental affairs director Ron Cohen says he’s got his hands full just keeping up with Forest Service and state regulations. The ski area, he says, simply lacks the resources to be more active on climate change. “Everybody knows — people who work here and think about strategy — we’re not ignorant of the issue,” Cohen says. “We know that there are these discussions, these issues, scientific theories, facts — all of the above — but we’re focused on business strategy a lot more than we are on something we have a lot less control over.”
I’m with Katz. What exactly do they want the ski industry to DO??
There are lots of other groups vigorously wringing their hands over ‘climate change’, as if they actually have the power to do anything about it. Pretty arrogant of man to think he actually has that much control over the planet.
I’ve been hearing this crap for decades. There is no basis for it whatsoever. Back in the ’70’s, all we heard was that we were entering a new ice age due to using fossil fuels. Then AlGore came along and invented the Global Warming Scam.
Give it a rest already folks. If you can’t figure this one out, I have a bridge to sell you.
“Pretty arrogant of man to think he actually has that much control over the planet.”
That doesn’t mean much coming from someone who believes the age of the earth is…. (insert you 4-5 digit number here).
Just because you can’t comprehend it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Aside from climate, humans have drastically altered the earth.
Denial is lazy. AB.
You didn’t answer the question Fish. WHAT, exactly, do you want the ski industry to do about it?
If you don’t have a serious answer, go stalk someone else.
Yep, the question I’ve always asked-If one is so sure there’s man made climate change/global warming occurring, what’s the plan to deal with it? And then what’s the plan to enforce other countries, such as China, to go along with the program?
Anthropogenic caused climate change is real. Al Gore may have popularized what climate scientists (now 98% of climate scientists) have been building the evidence for since the early 1990’s, but he did not invent it.
As to what the ski industry should do is quite simple. Do what we should all do, look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint in their operations. Some are doing just that. They could be at the forefront of industries lobbying state and federal legislatures to make proactive, and feasible programs to make positive changes in how we as a society lessen our production on green house gases. Work in a collaborative effort with their European counterparts to do the same thing.
I do not expect any industry to “solve” the problem, but I would like to see industries, particularly those that depend on stable weather patterns, to stay engaged in the process.
These are all very manageable and doable goals.
Rick
Lot’s of folks drank the Kool Aid on this one.
When they give up travel, heat & electricity I will pay attention to their conviction. Until then, they’re all just chasing smoke in the wind.
Dogula,
Here’s one solution ski areas can look at. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with the science on climate change, ski areas do spend a huge amount to power their lifts and amenities. A switch to on-site renewable energy could even mean an unheard of decrease in ticket prices.
http://ski.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/the-first-ski-area-with-100-onsite-renewable-energy.php
BShakey: you mean like the 98% of scientists who drank the kool aid, a number of years ago that provided amble evidence that there was a strong causal link between cigarette smoking and lung and heart disease? Those 2% of cigarette industry scientists sure showed them – oh wait that is not right. Or how about the 98% of scientists that drank the kool aid who thought they found a connection between use of freon and other products and thinning of the ozone layer. Those 2% of industry scientists sure showed them – oh darn, wrong example again.
I suspect if you went to 100 Drs. and 98 told you you had colon cancer and needed immediate treatment, but 2 told you it was simply gas and take beano – you would opt for taking beano, because the other drs. drank the kool aid. I am always amazed at how lay people who have absolutely no training, have not reviewed the thousands of articles published each year in peer-reviewed scientific journals on climate change (and if you tried you would not understand the statistical design and analysis of these studies can you say for example Information Theoretic and Bayesian statistics?), render an opinion on a subject that they know only from the views of the Heritage Foundation.
Ask those people who are suffering from the affects of cigaret smoking or those that contracted skin cancer prior to us reversing the thinning of the Ozone layer how relying on the 2% of the industry scientists worked for them.
Rick
Dog your question was: “What exactly do they want the ski industry to DO??”
I am not ‘they’ and I don’t answer facetious questions from willfully uninformed people.
You think that humans can’t possibly do enough to change the climate. And if i directed you to an article that accounts for the fossil fuels that have been consumed and shows how that amount of CO2 can account for the increase in atmospheric CO2 you and other deniers wouldn’t read it.
Oh yes. You ARE they. You’ve insisted repeatedly that you are a scientist (of some sort) and you’re constantly reminding us how much smarter you are than most of us here. That’s fine. You probably are.
But it doesn’t excuse your rudeness.
Actually the ‘they’ in this story is activists.
I am only concerned with data and analysis.
The real issue here is resource management and sustainability. And yes, we have a serious resource problem because fortunately angry-sky-man doesn’t exist, we create and solve our own problems. Forget climate. Do you know how much the water table in the San Joaquin has dropped in 50 years? You think it is arrogant to assume that humans are responsible for that?
Money is neutral in this discussion. Look into how low elevation resorts in Europe are doing with finding financing and insurance.
“Pretty arrogant of man to think he actually has that much control over the planet.”
Well we had enough control to cause the problem, so by logical extrapolation, we have enough control to fix or ameliorate it.
We are actually the “they”.
First, if you want to go ahead and deny climate change, that’s up to you, but just know that you’d be disagreeing with 97% of the most esteemed scientific community. And if then you think that every one of those scientists has an “agenda” (as is the typical reply) just know that the science is peer reviewed and it’s rock solid. It just is. Save the denial for UFO’s and stop politicizing it.
But we’re pretty shocked that anyone who lives in the mountains, as we assume you do, have this unique perspective. Can’t you see what has happened to your climate over the past 15 years? Didn’t you used to have pretty reliable snow by Thanksgiving? Weren’t your winters a bit longer 20 years ago? Science aside, it’s pretty evident.
We released the report in this article back in December not to convince anyone about the reality of climate change, but of its impact in places like Truckee and Tahoe City, for example. Places that have a high dependency on winter tourist dollars to maintain jobs and grow their communities economically. The impact of climate change is very serious business in these places and without dependable snow, jobs are lost and communities suffer. And people in DC have to know that.
And in regards to the resorts, we get it, we understand that businesses need to be run and other important elements factor in to how they can fight climate change. POW isn’t militant, we’re not making demands on anyone, we’re skiers and snowboarders like you, and we get it. Done right, fighting climate change doesn’t have to be a business killer. But the reality is, at some point very soon, it will start to impact their ability to run a strong business.
So what do we want? Think about the impact that a company like Vail could have if they just decided to lobby their Senators about climate change legislation – it could a game changer. They’re in a leadership position in the ski business and it’s a shame that they’re not rising to the challenge. They can say what they want about climate change, but we don’t appreciate them using it as a punch line.
And for those that think that its already a done deal, I can tell you that we’re working our asses off to make sure that that’s not the case. We’ve already changed the climate, we agree, but that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to hang up our skis forever. We do have control over the environment, because we’re causing it.
So, to answer your question, what we “want” are the stakeholders in the winter sports community using
their economic and social leverage to secure policy changes to limit greenhouse gasses. That’s it.
POW, I appreciate your thoughtful answer. I may not agree with your numbers, or with the idea that Vail or any other ski industry should lobby the Federal government to bring more legislation in an already over-regulated business climate. But this is one of those areas where civil people can agree to disagree. Without insulting one another.
Dogula,
It’s not a matter of agreeing to disagree about differing valid opinions, it’s the difference between the acceptance of the reality of science and the willfully ignorant belief in some delusional nonsense that the fossil fuel industry wants you to believe. Do you reality deniers ever have the smallest inkling that you might be being played for fools?
Dogula, thanks for the comment and certainly ok to disagree.
But it seems that your political belief is driving your acceptance of the science. The fact that you don’t want an over-regulated business climate shouldn’t cloud rational acceptance of scientific fact.
If you can believe in the science, but not agree on how we address it, then that’s ok.