Facing increasingly warmer winters, most PA ski resorts face certain extinction within 30 years. Yet they refuse to support candidates who would help their business survive
Like no other industry, the skiing business critically depends on cold winters. Atmospheric warming and the accompanying changing climate are largely to blame for how many ski resorts have gone out of business since the 1970s when there were more than a thousand small, medium, and large areas across the country. Today, there are just 481. Pennsylvania once had more than 90 ski areas. Today, only 20 survive. Along with the loss of more accessible winter recreation in southern and middle Pennsylvania, these 70 lost ski areas have come at a cost of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in economic activity.
Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, gave a speech to the American Petroleum Institute in 1959 in which he warned the industry that the burning of their products was warming the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, he noted, “transmits visible light but absorbs...infrared radiation...emitted from the Earth.” It’s just .04% of our atmosphere, but CO2 is very efficient at trapping heat. Measured in parts per million, just trace amounts are the difference between no polar ice caps and a mile of ice over our heads. Climatologists and other atmospheric scientists around the world tell us that 350 parts per million of CO2 fall at the high end of the Goldilocks zone for us. Unfortunately, thanks to our Congress, state legislatures, and the polluting industries for which many of our elected officials act as business agents, we have now surpassed 405 parts per million, up from an estimated 325 ppm in 1970.
That addition of 80 ppm of carbon to our thin atmosphere accounts for the ten hottest years on record falling in the last twelve years (with the exception of 1998 which ranks as the 8th hottest year). Almost every new year breaks the previous record. Winters consistently cold enough to make and sustain a snow pack are becoming a thing of the past, and no ski areas will exist in as little as 20 or 30 years if a minimum base of snow cannot be maintained for at least 80 days per season. Most resorts now struggle to have a 100 day season. With so much to lose, you could be forgiven for thinking that this country’s ski resorts would be rushing to support political candidates who want to move us towards a clean energy economy. You would be wrong.
I sent a request to each ski resort in Pennsylvania asking for a donation to an environmental political action committee which supports environmentally progressive candidates. Of the 20 ski areas I contacted, only five responded. All five ignored my request for donations to protect their industry, instead responding to the second part of my request which concerned placing flyers on vehicles in their lots to solicit donations to climate PACs.
This, of course, is not the answer Big Carbon would have given. They would have enthusiastically agreed to contribute generously to a PAC which supports their industry. In actual fact, they already shovel tens of millions each year to their boosters in the PA legislature effectively giving them bottomless campaign war chests. Oil, gas, coal, and pipeline lobbies understand better than the ski industry that to get elected officials to protect your business, you need to finance them as candidates. Big Carbon’s investment in the legislature has paid off in spades, too.
Our legislators’ undying fealty to their donors can be seen in regular votes they take to increase our dependence on oil, gas, and coal. Some recent examples include refusing to implement the modest Clean Power Plan, subsidizing unsustainable pollution-intensive energy production, and enabling the continued build-out of the fracking and pipeline industry. Massive fugitive methane emissions from extraction and transportation/pipeline operations (as well as carbon emissions from burning gas) make natural gas no better than coal in greenhouse-effect terms since methane is a more potent heat-trapping molecule than CO2. And as the carbon and methane content of our atmosphere measurably increases each year, the end of the ski industry in Pennsylvania draws nigh.
The time has passed for asking incumbents to do the right thing. We need to replace them with honest “believers of science” who will, among many other things, end all subsidies for fossil fuels, create better incentives that lower the cost of solar and wind installation, speed our transition to a 100% clean energy economy, and join with other states to invest in research to make those technologies even more efficient. It’s not like renewable energy is even expensive anymore. Solar panels cost $100 per watt in 1970 and just 33¢ today. We just need a legislature to do for renewables what they’ve been doing for fossil fuels for a century. This would not only save the thousands of winter sports jobs in Pennsylvania; it would create many tens of thousands of clean energy jobs.
Trade groups for the ski industry (like the National Ski Area Association) do have efforts underway to educate the public about the need to get off carbon, but that can only go so far. Fighting the well-funded fossil fuel Colossus will take big money to counter their propaganda. It’s time for the ski industry and all other businesses that thrive on it to pick their own side and start spending on candidates who care about our future. There’s no time to waste. Unless emissions are drastically reduced in the immediate future, temperature rise will likely be locked in.
If kids growing up in 50 years are able to enjoy skiing and riding in Pennsylvania, it will be because the threatened ski industry, related businesses, and rational people helped fight back. You can do your part by contacting your favorite ski resorts and encouraging them to take action and by giving what you can to candidates who would protect your winter pastime.
Ken Hemphill
Ken Hemphill is an EXCOM member and the communications coordinator for three land preservation advocacy groups in southeast PA. He grew up skiing the shuttered Chadds Peak Ski Area in Chadds Ford, PA