The byline of an essay I wrote almost a year ago was "how to be a professional skier and maintain climate cred." It seems that critiques like mine, which targeted the hypocrisy of athletes who jet and helicopter and snowmobile around the planet and then admonish their followers to “vote climate,” had an effect. Protect Our Winters (POW) is the foremost organization advocating for “climate action” on behalf of outdoor enthusiasts—skiers and snowboarders mainly—but with aspirations of becoming a big tent for all manner of people who engage in outdoor pursuits, including hiking, camping, hunting, biking, and fishing. Teton Gravity Research (TGR) is a nearly 30-year-old “action sports media company and lifestyle brand.” They are based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and they create and shoot films, television series, and commercial campaigns. They sell merchandise and maintain the busiest snow sports website in the world. The two organizations have collaborated to craft a response to these critiques.
I would like to claim some responsibility for provoking this response, but I doubt there are any professional skiers or snowboarders among my list of subscribers. They haven’t read my critique. What they have read are the comments on their social media feeds. Support and affirmation are the main event in these comment threads, but criticism is a sour side note. The critiques are short form versions of my own. The following are actual comments penned in response to a professional skier posting about banks investing in oil and gas companies, and about bad snow conditions.
You wanna protect our winters? Quit jet-setting around the world. And quit promoting that lifestyle.
They invest in working technologies so you can enjoy the benefits of civilization. Does someone want to live without electricity, heat, and fuel?
Just stick to the ski posts.
You advocating about lack of snow because of climate change but how’d you get down there for your ski vacation?
Apparently there has been enough of this criticism for TGR and POW to consider it a threat. Their response leverages both their skills and their stars. They made a ski film called “The Hypocrite.” The following quotes are the promotional summaries of the film by POW and TGR respectively.
From POW: Created by Professional skier and POW Athlete Alliance member Amie Engerbretson, The Hypocrite challenges the notion that athletes are hypocrites because they burn fossil foils by driving snowmobiles, skiing via helicopters, and chasing fresh snow around the world – all while advocating for the climate. This film showcases the realization that individual actions are not the core issue and that significant systemic shifts are needed to shape a different future. By dismantling the culture of individual blame that leads to guilt, the documentary encourages unity and collaboration among individuals who share a common passion for the outdoors and for the protection of their playgrounds.
From TGR: The Hypocrite" delves into a critical discourse that is resonating with individuals across various spheres. In the context of climate advocacy, the film examines the inherent contradiction between personal actions and systemic efforts. The story is masterfully woven through the perspective of a professional skier, confronting the complex interplay between advocating for change and relying on fossil fuels for athletic pursuits. The film aspires to foster unity and collaboration within the outdoor community, transcending perceived hypocrisy and feelings of not fitting in. It aims to dismantle the culture of individual blame and guilt, focusing instead on the systemic shifts required to pave the way for a sustainable future. By erasing the boundaries that label individuals as hypocrites, the narrative invites viewers to recognize the urgent need for collective action and change.
Promotional jargon and touchy-feely psycho-babble aside, the objective of the film is to assuage the guilt felt by professional skiers and snowboarders who engage in campaigns to “end fossil fuels” while at the same time flying around the world and using helicopters and snowmobiles to ensure that their social media feeds are regularly topped up with footage of them slaying the steep and deep. The film tries to convince us that individual actions are meaningless, and that only systemic or structural change achieved through legislative or regulatory bodies can alter the warming trajectory of the climate. Social license is thus granted to professional athletes to maintain their hypocritcal lifestyles, as long as they advocate for systemic change.
The film begins with its main narrator, professional skier Amie Engerbretson skinning up through a snowy forest in the dark. Over the soft hiss and crush of her slow march she says, “winters are changing. The climate is changing.” From there we cut to stock scenes of forest fires, floods, and calving glaciers while voice-overs from news feeds declare “the hottest day on earth was broken again, for the second day in a row.” Amie then acknowledges her complicity.
I’m constantly part of the problem. I’m marketing consumer products to be bought over and over and over again. I’m flying all over the planet. I’m driving all over North America. I drive a snowmobile. I ride in helicopters … I’m living the dream. But those actions, that life, is killing the dream. By burning fossil fuels I’m contributing to the death of the thing that I love most."
Engerbretson is a happy warrior. Her Instagram feed showcases her smiling face, her fabulous skiing, and an adventure lifestyle. Conspicuously absent from her feed, at least until recently, is footage of her on a snowmobile. This is odd, because the second part of the film documents how she is in love with her “snow pony.”
I understand the love. I grew up with snowmobiles. In the town I grew up in you could get to any address on a snowmobile. Kids rode them to school, and to hockey practice, and to their part-time jobs. On Friday nights we rode them to the theater, and the coffee shop, and to parties. I never owned one of my own—just rode whatever my parents had at the time. My father was a frugal man, so he never splurged on the newest or the fastest. He just wanted reliable transportation that would take him to an ice-fishing spot or to our cabin on the lake. His one snowmobile indulgence occurred when a local person needed fast cash and sold a mid-70s Arctic Cat El Tigre 250 for a song. Dad bought it. The El Tigre was designed for oval racing and had tuned exhaust pipes with expansion chambers and that classic ringing exhaust note that only comes from a high-performance two stroke. I rode it a few times before he flipped it for a small profit. It was fast, but probably didn’t make 50 horsepower. The modern, two-stroke mountain and trail sleds of today come with engine displacements up to 850 cubic centimeters and horsepower ratings in the 150 to 200 range. That’s as much power as my e46 BMW had, but when you’re trying to climb mountains in bottomless powder, you need it.
Professional skiers are influencers and lifestyle leaders. They make their living by creating and sharing media content that others want to watch. One of the ways they remain relevant and popular is by constantly sharing new material. If a big sponsor like Red Bull calls you up and says, “hey, we’re going to take a group of skiers to Kazakhstan and use a helicopter to access some mountain back-country that has only been occupied by yaks for the last 100 years,” the new material creates itself. But what do you do when the sponsor drops you off at home and says, “see you in two months.” You don’t go and ski at the local hill with the punters. Your followers aren’t interested in that. What you do is meet some friends at the trailhead, strap on some skis and camera equipment and blast into the back country on snowmobiles that allow you to ski and film lines that would take you a whole day to access on foot, if you could do it at all. Content problem solved.
Marie-France Roy, a professional snowboarder, is quoted in the film.
If you want to be a professional skier or snowboarder in this area, and get the best content you can, a snowmobile is like, an essential tool.
Amie Engerbretson describes her relationship with snowmobiling in less pragmatic and more emotional terms.
I had these two lives, like, diverging from each other. I’m trying to become a climate advocate, while at the same time I’m falling in love with snowmobiling.
As I mentioned above, Amie’s snowmobile, a Ski-Doo Summit X, was essentially absent from her Instagram feed until late last year, when she began to promote the film. When you acknowledge that the name of your upcoming film is “The Hypocrite,” you have to own it.
There is a lot of snowmobile footage in the film. And it’s not of them performing their utilitarian duties. It’s snowmobiles dropping off cliffs into bottomless powder. It’s rider and machine carving lines on steep descents and the snow curling up and over them like a smooth barrel on Hawaii’s famed north shore. Skiing, snowboarding, and snowmobiling in deep snow are shown as one and the same, just athletes expressing themselves on a white mountain canvas. At the end of one segment a drone camera catches four riders stopping in a meadow and bumping fists. The machines are completely covered in snow, and they do look like a quartet of shaggy white snow ponies.
At around the ten-minute mark the film starts to change direction. Amie goes to visit Chris Rubens, a Canadian professional skier who operates a small, organic farm in Revelstoke, B.C. As they tour his farm, Amie starts the process of turning away from individual action—giving up your snowmobile, perhaps—and focusing on POW’s raison d’etre: systemic change. To his credit, Chris wears a sly smile while he listens to Amie’s speech. He listens patiently while she talks about “touching power levers,” and “activating on them.” He knows where this is headed, but he’s having none of it. His answer is simple. “But if we’re not going to change, who’s going to change?” Amie’s caught out and she knows it. It’s not the answer she wants. She loves her snow pony.
In the car on the way home she slithers out of his trap. She says, “he’s right. We all have to change. But I don’t know if we have to change in the way that he, like, thinks we have to change.”
If you can’t get an organic farmer to absolve you of your climate sins, where do you turn? You go where the manure is really deep—Harvard University. Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Ms. Oreskes offers Amie the “get out of jail free” card that she’s looking for.
Maybe there will be someone out there who says something critical of you because you used a snowmobile to get to a mountain. And you can say, “okay, I know that, you know, my use of a snowmobile is actually a very small part of my carbon footprint. And I also know that my carbon footprint is not actually the real issue, right? The real issue is the structural change that we need.”
I find it interesting that Professor Oreskes is so convinced of the attribution of 20th and 21st century climatic changes to CO2 emissions from the burning of hydrocarbons. She published a book in 1999 detailing how American geoscientists in the first half of the 20th century maintained a consensus that the continents were fixed in place. By the time I went to university in the 1980s the fixist consensus had been entirely replaced by a mobilist consensus that views continental drift as scientific fact. You would think this history would keep her more open to critique and skepticism of the consensus statements about climate change.
To the narrators in the movie—Professor Oreskes, POW founder Jeremy Jones, Aspen One executive Auden Schendler—the oil and gas companies are Machiavellian in their scheming. Their goal is to divide people who are concerned about the climate by encouraging use of the term “hypocrite,” and to shift the blame for a climate crisis from their shoulders to unwitting consumers that would have given up using their dangerous fuels long ago if they had just been told what the dangers were. The story is framed as David and Goliath, and it reflects the tone of the lawsuit filed by the city of Chicago against oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute. The people, like the city, are helpless addicts in the face of all-powerful oil and gas companies. Maybe I’m naive, but I don’t think oil and gas companies are trolling the media feeds of professional skiers and snowboarders, calling them out for being hypocrites. It’s their fellow athletes that are calling them out, and they’re not doing it because the oil and gas business has tricked them. They do it because they, like Chris Rubens, see through the facade.
Professor Oreskes talks about misinformation and misdirection, but she and others in the film engage in a massive psy-op of their own. In their telling, hydrocarbon fuels are a drug. A snowmobile gets pushed our direction and we ride it and get a high that we can’t give up. The oil companies smile and carve another notch in their belt. I wrote in my last essay that drug use, whether you’re talking legal substances like tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, or illegal drugs like opioids, crystal meth, and fentanyl, does nothing to make your life better. The contrast with HC fuels, which have the capacity to lift billions of people out of crushing poverty, could not be more stark.
All lists of the top medicinal drug discoveries place penicillin at the top. Penicillin is responsible for saving tens if not hundreds of millions of lives. Penicillin may cause side effects. You could write the same two sentences about HC fuels but the number of people saved would be higher. Oil and gas companies have no need to push their products because their benefits are ubiquitous. Forty years of warnings have not made a dent in the percentage of worldwide energy supplied by HC fuels and usage continues to rise.
There are some inane moments in the film. One is courtesy of a professional skier named Todd Ligare. Another is from POW founder Jeremy Jones. Ligare, whose eyes are a little crazy, takes a combative tone. He says he is pissed off because in order to do the things he loves, he has to use fossil fuels to do it. He goes on and says he would like to make different choices, but he can’t because there are things that are “roadblocking that process from happening.” You mean things like physics? Jones says with a straight face that energy collected from solar and wind installations is “way cheaper” than digging energy out of the ground, and it employs way more people. Jeremy is not reading the same Substack authors that I am.
To illustrate the stark difference between individual action and systemic action there is a graphic that compares the carbon footprint of Amie’s 22/23 winter season with other entities and actions.
The graphic is designed to illustrate the relative size (tiny) of Amie’s snowmobile lifestyle to legislative and policy action like cancelling oil and gas lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). By this comparison, the impact of systemic change is about 200 million times greater than Amie curbing her lifestyle. But here’s the thing. The systemic action of cancelling oil and gas leasing in ANWR has not reduced yearly CO2 emissions by ONE metric ton per year, let alone five billion. The world uses 100 million barrels of oil every day. Therefore, the world gets 100 million barrels of oil every day, from SOMEWHERE. If not ANWR then somewhere else. The world right now is not having any difficulty keeping up with demand. I suppose if you take enough ANWRs off the table you might eventually create the market conditions—scarcity—that would curb demand, but that’s not happening today, or next year, or for years in the future. If you want to make a difference today, curbing Amie’s lifestyle is infinitely (27 divided by 0) more impactful than the big yellow ball in the graphic.
Describing the size of the constituency, POW founder Jones refers to the 50 million outdoor enthusiasts who comprise the “outdoor state.” They are skiers, snowboarders, hunters, fisherpersons, hikers, campers, snowmobilers, and more. Dr. Greg Nemet, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, discusses the political power that the “outdoor state” could wield.
It’s a pretty powerful force, such that it could actually counter this, you know, immense cohesion that the fossil fuel industry has to the extent that they lose, you know what we say in academic jargon, is their social license to operate.
Hmm. I don’t think so. I’ll go back to the tobacco well once more. Tobacco does nothing but kill you. The industry was found guilty. They still operate. Try removing the social license of a product that benefits people, every day, all over the world. Trying to convince people that systemic change matters, and individual behavior does not, is nothing more than a ploy by the outdoor lobby to maintain their own social license to operate, which is threatened by their hypocrisy. Or, I’m going to keep riding my snowmobile, because I really love it, while at the same time trying really hard to vote in people who will make me quit.
Is the film convincing? Not to me. But I’m not the person they’re trying to sway. The film hit YouTube on February 21st. It has 42 thousand views so far and 474 “likes.” Seems light. If the outdoor state is 50 million strong the number of views is less than a tenth of a percent of the population. As with any social media feed, likes and comments are a good measure of success. And while the comments section does contain some kudos, the ratio of critique to kudo is much higher for this film than it is for most of the content posted by the professional skiers I follow. Below are a couple of examples of the criticism.
The policy issues and outsized impacts of corporations are certainly the key issues, but it feels really disingenuous to just hand wave (away) any modicum of personally responsibility so long (as) its fun for you.
To me, this comes off as a really tone deaf video that's trying to rationalize a lifestyle that is ultimately using far and away more fossil fuels than the average global user.
Two of my favorite professional skiers/adventures are Tatum Monod (@tatummond on Instagram) and Rory Wayne Bushfield (@bushywayne on Instagram). To facilitate their escapades, that include skiing, fishing, hunting, and jindle boarding (check out Rory on Instagram for a jindle boarding primer), they ride snowmobiles and jet skis, drive big trucks, and fly airplanes. And they don’t apologize. Park it, or own it. You can’t have both.
🖤 “Like” this essay or be forced to give me your snowmobile (Ski-Doo Summit X preferred).
Leave a comment. It helps me out when you engage.
Trevor, another winner! I would really like to see this kind of writing in American Spectator or, hell the New Yorker because it's excellent and immediately thought provoking. There is such a light touch to the inevitable conclusion - these people (and every greeny who carries their card with pride) are full of shit and compromised by their daily energy choices...as well as the realities of the energy conservation law and economics. If only corporate media were not entirely compromised by a brain eating virus you would write for a broad audience. I'm sharing your work.
You and I shared a back and forth regarding skiing after I first found your Substack page. You certainly hit some raw nerves with this post as far as I'm concerned.
I've followed Jeremy Jones on Instagram for a few years, and have let him have it in the comment section a few times. Do I think he is well meaning? Actually I do. But he's so deep in the b.s. that he can't think straight.
Here's a documentary from him (via Protect Our Winters) that is two years old. If you don't wish to view the entire 53 minutes, I would suggest you go the 19:00 mark and watch his interview with this "Science Historian" from Harvard. She's just a classic, even specifically claiming "Exxon Mobil is making trillions of dollars of profits off this con game". Sadly, countless sheep will believe exactly what she said. The documentary has many other predictable gems sprinkled throughout..."It's the science, man!":
https://youtu.be/VpKtEH5uvw0?si=pyNPGzVOJAAQCGFi
I've always loved skiing, and I admit to still following several other skiers and snowboarders (and TGR!) on Instagram. However, I bristle quite a bit when some of them complain about cost of living, as if they have some god given right to live where they wish, hit the slopes when conditions are good, party hard and never have a real career. The environmental zealotry is often just an uninformed excuse to feel noble about themselves.