Heresy Snowboarding

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Auden Schendler of Aspen-Snowmass knows the frustration of being charged with the responsibility of being a green champion.

Despite Schendler coming up with some impressive work to date, the Business Week article describes his frustation:

But at the end of this arid late-summer afternoon, Schendler is feeling anything but triumphant. He pulls a company sedan to the side of a dirt road and turns off the motor. “Who are we kidding?” he says, finally. Despite all his exertions, the resort’s greenhouse-gas emissions continue to creep up year after year. More vacationers mean larger lodgings burning more power. Warmer winters require tons of additional artificial snow, another energy drain. “I’ve succeeded in doing a lot of sexy projects yet utterly failed in what I set out to do,” Schendler says. “How do you really green your company? It’s almost f—— impossible.”

Schendler’s frustration mirrors mine. At every chance, I push to find out what, at least here in Australia, our ski resort managers are doing to combat climate change and minimise their footprint. The answer is invariably effectively “nothing”, which doesn’t fill me with much hope. Alpine ecological health is a canary for global warming and if the managers responsible for providing services and infrastructure aren’t attacking this issue in an aggressively sustainable manner, particularly in a really marginal alpine snowsports market like Australia, I have to ask what the hell they’re doing?

Why aren’t we (that’s you and I, reader) pushing our leaders and each other to improve. Perhaps we’re all so overwhelmed by the constant barrage of bad news, that we don’t know what to do?

From a news.com.au article on the issue:

Top researchers who gathered in Copenhagen for a climate change conference said they were worried that people could not psychologically deal with the enormity of the problem and were reverting to doing nothing.

French glaciologist Claude Lorius, one of the first scientists to publish in 1987 evidence that global warming was real, said he despaired of getting the message across.

“At first, I thought that we could convince people. But there is a terrible inertia,” he said.

“I fear that society is not up to the challenge of a crisis like this. Today, as a human being I am pessimistic.”

John Church, an expert on sea levels at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystem Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, took an equally dim view of our collective capacity for denial.

“Perhaps society has realised the seriousness, but it certainly hasn’t realised the urgency,” he said.

“But even if you are pessimistic – and sometimes I am – it does not help. What are you going to do? Chop off your hands and give up? That’s not a solution either,” he said.

Fortunately, though, it seems we humans want to actually do something about this.

So, my question is where the hell are the governments on making this happen. Perhaps, they’re all a bit confused. The science community told them we need to limit average temp rises to 2deg C. Though even this looks too high now. Shifting goalposts make things hard for politicians, but that’s the nature of the beast I guess.

I remain ever hopeful, and I hope you, the reader, care enough to do something too. If people see you caring, they may care too – before it’s too late.

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