Ski resorts fight global warming

SALT LAKE CITY | Ski resorts across the country were using the Thanksgiving weekend to jump-start their winter seasons, but with every passing year comes a frightening realization: If global temperatures continue to rise, fewer and fewer resorts will be able to open for the traditional beginning of ski season.

Warmer night air is making it more difficult to make snow, and the snow that falls naturally is melting earlier in the spring.

In few places is this a bigger concern than the American West, where skiing is one of the most lucrative segments of the tourism industry and often the only reason many people visit cash-strapped states such as Utah during winter.

But even as world leaders descend on Copenhagen next month to figure out a way to reduce carbon emissions blamed in global warming, the industry is still grappling with leaders in some of their own ski-crazy states who refuse to concede that humans have any impact on climate change.

Chief among them is Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, who says he will host what he calls the first “legitimate debate” about man’s role in climate change in the spring.

While the world’s leading scientific organizations insist that the debate was settled long ago, the former real estate agent who took office when Jon Huntsman Jr. resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China maintains that it wasn’t.

“He’s said to me that the jury is out, in his mind, whether it’s man-caused, and he thinks and believes that the public jury is still out,” said Mr. Herbert’s environmental adviser, Ted Wilson, a Democrat.

Mr. Herbert’s reluctance to acknowledge that greenhouse gases contribute to global warming quietly frustrates Utah ski resorts that depend on state marketing money, but it openly infuriates industry officials elsewhere who liken it to having a debate about whether the world is flat.

“That’s just kind of raging ignorance,” said Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability for Aspen (Colo.) Skiing Co. “We’re not environmentalists; we’re business people. We have studied the hell out of the climate science. To have a neighboring governor not believe it … It’s absurd.”

A climate study by the Aspen Global Change Institute is forecasting that if global emissions continue to rise, Aspen will warm 14 degrees by the end of this century, giving it a similar climate to that of Amarillo, Texas.

Many ski companies and the mountain towns they’ve created have been working to reduce their carbon footprints and have been advocating for significant policy changes for years. In California, the ski industry was one of the first groups to support legislation requiring the state to reduce greenhouse gases to 1990 emission levels by 2020.

Aspen Skiing Co. is widely recognized as a national leader, but Mr. Schendler readily acknowledges that the nation’s ski resorts can do little on their own to affect climate change.

He said resorts such as Aspen and Snowmass are at their best when they educate their highly affluent - and politically connected - guests about global warming’s effects.

“You need federal legislation in the U.S.,” he said. “You need it to help drive an international agreement.”

Mr. Herbert and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, recently teamed up to oppose federal cap-and-trade legislation that many in the ski industry support, saying it could cost jobs in a state that’s heavily dependent on coal for energy.

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