Global Warming Pushes Ski Industry Downhill

With the Olympics starting this week, all eyes are on the slopes of Turin. But skiing and snowboarding could disappear from our collective culture in about 50 years if global-warming forecasts ring true. In a lot of popular ski areas, there simply won't be any snow.

It's all downhill from here

It's already happening in parts of Europe: They're wrapping glaciers in Switzerland, and Scottish Highlands ski areas are being recast as mountain-biking destinations. In the United States, resorts in the Pacific Northwest got a harbinger last season when a warm winter led to a 78 percent drop in skier visits.

Global warming, of course, will impact practically every aspect of life the world over, and recreational plights won't be our biggest worry. But right now, the ski industry is the perfect coal-mine canary for its fallout. And while no single industry can reverse climate change, enlightened self-interest is driving ski areas to adopt a wide range of innovative energy measures to prolong their survival -- and maybe ours.

Are they doing enough? It depends whom you ask.

Mountain Unrest

The center of the green skiing movement in the United States is Aspen, a place not exactly known for reducing consumption of anything. The Aspen Skiing Co., which operates four mountains in the area, first tinted green in 1997, when CEO Patrick O'Donnell -- who had previously run Patagonia -- hired Auden Schendler as the industry's first in-house environmental affairs director. Since then, critics and observers ranging from the U.S. Green Building Council to the Natural Resources Defense Council to Plenty magazine, which named Aspen North America's top eco-ski resort in 2004, have hailed their work as a model for the industry -- and for other outdoor-recreation industries as well.

"Our whole environmental program is organized under the umbrella of climate," says Schendler, who previously worked at the nearby Rocky Mountain Institute. "Climate change should be driving everything we all do."

For its part, Aspen has enacted a top-to-bottom program to conserve energy and water and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, incorporating green buildings, a minihydroelectric plant, biodiesel-driven groomers and wind power purchases. This year, the company became the first resort of any kind to join the Chicago Climate Exchange, North America's first voluntary, legally binding emissions-trading market. Aspen has even set up a consulting business to help other resorts and businesses go green.

A monumental moment

The $4 billion ski industry "got a wake-up call" in 1998, notes Schendler, when protesters torched Vail. The fact that radical greens would burn a place most people envision as part of an outdoors experience stunned the industry into introspection. Until that point, says Schendler, "there was this perception that the industry must be environmentally friendly because these are all really outdoorsy people, but the reality of it was there was no environmental scrutiny whatsoever."

Two years later, more than 160 resorts signed a nonbinding charter initiated by the National Ski Areas Association that pledged environmental responsibility. Today, of the 492 ski resorts in the United States, about 180 participate in the NSAA's Sustainable Slopes program, which grew out of the charter. Schendler says things are changing, but not enough. "The industry response [to climate change] has largely been to increase snowmaking and increase water storage," he laments, "not, 'Let's lobby hard for legislation and start being more energy-efficient.'" As a result, he says, "not much has happened industrywide."

Geraldine Link, director of public policy at the Lakewood, Colo.-based NSAA, disagrees. "The industry is taking climate change seriously, and I think we're doing a lot," she says. For the last two years, the NSAA has partnered with NRDC on a Keep Winter Cool public-education campaign. The goal is to reach as many of America's 15 million skiers and snowboarders as possible through public-service announcements and promotional materials. This winter's big push is selling "cool tags" -- mini, $2 versions of alternative-energy certificates, whose proceeds let resorts buy the real thing.