Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (11 page)

A few months later, Niaqornat would become one of a handful of villages to vote 100 percent in favor of self-governance. The referendum would pass by 75.5 percent across Greenland, but in tiny Niaqornat there were no doubters.

 • • • 

EARLY IN OUR TOUR,
Minik had worried aloud that he was forgetting much of the philosophy he’d studied. “I’ve been too much into politics,” he’d told me. But during our last conversation, he became a philosopher again, pondering not just the morality of secession but the means to this end. We were in Ilulissat, Greenland’s big tourist town, where we had a final layover. Nearby was the fastest-sliding glacier in the Northern Hemisphere, Sermeq Kujalleq, which spits thirty-five trillion liters of ice into Disko Bay every year.

I had spent the early evening on the boardwalk of the Hotel Arctic, a cliff-side landmark that happened to be hosting the Nordic Council’s Common Concern for the Arctic conference: European dignitaries wearing somber colors and fretting abstractly about the warming north. Peering into a bay full of icebergs at sunset, I heard one of them chat up an attractive blonde by rattling off facts about the coming doomsday. His tone was solemn, his voice almost a whisper. “I don’t mean to scare you,” he murmured. It was the first time I’d heard someone try to use climate change to get someone else into bed. “I really don’t mean to scare you,” he said again. She didn’t look scared at all.

Upstairs, Minik and I ordered hamburgers at the bar and stared out at the lights of Ilulissat. “It’s so strange,” Minik said. “The more the ice cap melts, the more Greenland will rise. These other countries are sinking, and Greenland is rising. It is literally rising.” Below us, the dignitaries filed into their banquet. “We know Black Angel was really bad for the environment the first time,” Minik continued. “It ruined the fjord. Is it okay to ruin three or four fjords in order to build the country? I hate to even think this, but we have a lot of fjords. I don’t know. That’d be utilitarian philosophy, wouldn’t it?”

He shook his head. “We’re very aware that we’ll cause more climate change by drilling for oil,” he said. “But should we not? Should we not when it can buy us our independence?”

FOUR

FATHER OF INVENTION

ISRAEL SAVES THE MELTING ALPS

T
he winter after Greenland voted yes, I traveled to where the melt was entirely less welcome. The Pitztal, or Pitz Valley, is thirty miles west of Innsbruck, the capital of the Austrian state of Tyrol. To reach it, I drove a rented Ford Fiesta at car-rattling speeds down the autobahn, then veered south at the village of Arzl, which had a host of small hotels and a church with an onion-domed steeple. I followed a two-lane road uphill through more postcard villages, passing fields, cows, and herders’ huts—remnants of the pre-tourism economy—as the wooded walls of the valley steepened and busloads of Dutch vacationers appeared. After half an hour, the valley seemed to come to a head. There was a parking lot, a ticket booth, and a tunnel bored into a mountainside—an underground funicular railway. I boarded it and eight minutes later was thirty-six hundred feet higher, staring at the Alps’ most famous disappearing glacier.

One measure of the Pitztal Glacier’s decline is that one of the ski lifts built atop it has had to be moved three times in twenty-five years. Another is the giant, insulated blanket the resort cloaks over the glacier every summer, hoping to slow the melt. As a whole, Europe’s Alps have lost half their ice over the last century, one-fifth of it since the 1980s. The 925 named glaciers in Austria are receding at an average of thirty to fifty feet a year, twice the rate recorded a decade ago. What has brought international fame to the Pitztal in particular—reports on NBC, articles in
National Geographic
and
USA Today
—is less the rate of its melt than the last-ditch absurdity of its glacier blanket. Workers cover nearly thirty acres at an annual cost of $120,000, preserving five vertical feet of snow per season. The technique has spread to Germany’s Zugspitze and Switzerland’s Andermatt and Verbier. But it only partly works: Covered or not, the Pitztal Glacier has already shrunk so much that it now peters out seven hundred feet above the lift station. During the all-important shoulder seasons—Pitztal is the highest of the five Austrian resorts used for fall and spring skiing—the last section of the ski run is a pile of jagged boulders.

Some 80 million tourists come to the Alps each ski season. Some 1.2 million Tyroleans, including nearly everyone in the Pitztal, depend on glacier skiing for their livelihoods. But across Europe, across the world, an economy is imperiled. In early 2007, slopes were bare the week before the famed Hahnenkamm World Cup race in Pitztal’s neighboring Kitzbühel, and helicopters had to fly in 160,000 cubic feet of snow at a cost of more than $400,000. That same year, a British investor bought Switzerland’s low-lying Ernen ski area for 1 Swiss franc; resort managers in Whistler, Canada, began using computerized global-warming simulations to choose the site of their next lift (answer: try higher uphill); Bolivian scientists declared that the country’s lone ski area, 17,388-foot Chacaltaya, would lose its glacier entirely within three years (they would be proven right); and the Australian-designed, indoor, revolving Ski-Trac was loudly promoted “as the answer to the problem of climate change.” The next winter, dome-encased indoor ski areas, including the seven-hundred-vertical-foot SnowWorld Landgraaf in the low-lying Netherlands, were officially added to the European race circuit.

Snowmaking has become a billion-dollar global industry. Cannons now spray man-made snow on nearly half of Austria’s ski terrain, sucking up roughly 500,000 gallons of water per acre of artificial snow. Across the Alps, snowmakers use more water than does Vienna, a city of 1.7 million people—as much water per acre, it turns out, as a typical field of wheat. But traditional snowmaking, no matter how much it drains Europe’s ponds and lakes, cannot secure the Alpine economy. It requires perfect conditions—below-freezing temperatures, a humidity of less than 70 percent, and minimal winds—and at Pitztal at least, these conditions are rarely present anymore when they’re most needed.

When I visited the resort, the mountains were blindingly white, drenched in full sun and cloaked in natural February snow. The boulders were buried, while parts of the insulated blanket remained visible, its ridged individual sections poking out of the slope like vertebrae. From the end of the funicular at 9,318 feet, I followed the crowds to ride a clear-walled cable car to 11,286 feet, looking out at a vast fishbowl of a basin split by jagged ridges. A blast of cold wind met me at the top, and I quickly clicked into my skis. I dropped through patches of ice to an expanse of soft powder that led to a groomed run that led, eventually, to a modernistic, slate-paneled, fifty-foot-high cement building—the reason I’d come. The building housed one of the world’s first models of the IDE All Weather Snowmaker, a $2 million device capable of shooting out thirty-five thousand cubic feet of snow in twenty-four hours at any temperature on any day of the year. For Pitztal, it was the latest salvo in the war against melt. For me, after travels in Alaska, Norway, and Greenland, it was a symbol of a new kind of climate response. Here, as in many of the places I would soon visit, the effects of global warming were no boon. They were a problem. The upside, if any, was in selling the best Band-Aid.

A ruddy-faced lift manager named Reinhold let me into the building, and he stood with me as I stared at a giant white cylinder, a welter of tubes and pipes, and a row of gray instrument panels lining the back wall. Neither of us could read the labels. They were written in Hebrew.

 • • • 

“THE ECONOMIC IMPACT
of Global Warming Is Beginning to Show,” the press release had read. “IDE’s All Weather Snowmaker brings under your control what previously could not be controlled!” It sounded like snake oil, but the pitch that had attracted the Austrians carried a good pedigree. It came from a nation with a history of overcoming the worst, from a corporation—Israel Desalination Enterprises—already making millions off climate change by wringing the salt out of salt water. The reason I traveled to Austria, and soon to Israel, is that the small story of the snowmaker—and its intertwining with desalination—represented the perfection of a rosy ideal: that innovation and market forces, when unleashed on climate change, can save us from it. Both Israel and IDE also embodied a worldview that was at once empowering and dangerous: that solutions are worth their side effects. And their machines were more proof that technological defenses against climate change are generally going first to people who can afford them, those who are emitting the most carbon, who are taking care of themselves before turning to the developing world.

How Israelis could know about snow was explained to me a week after I left Pitztal, when I met IDE’s technology chief and self-proclaimed “best skier” at his home thirty minutes from Tel Aviv. Avraham Ophir was dying of cancer, a white-haired man with a soft voice. His two colleagues who sat with me on a couch, Moshe Tessel and Rafi Stoffman, looked at him with a mixture of fondness and awe. He was the institutional knowledge of IDE, a now iconic Israeli company, and the hero of one of its two gulag creation stories. He sat back in a red leather chair and began telling it.

“Look, it’s a long story, but I try to make it short,” he said. “I was born in eastern Poland, in a town called Bialystok. My father owned the factory that produced turpentine, which comes from the wood of trees in this region. Now, in the beginning of the Second World War, we were first occupied by the Germans for two weeks, and then the Russians came in. My father being a capitalist, he was taken prisoner and sent to a gulag in northern Siberia. And we, as the family of a prisoner, were sent to the south of Siberia, actually northern Kazakhstan.” There, Avraham was forced to learn how to ski. “You would take two simple wooden planks that were very strong,” he said, “and you would put a leather strip around it, and with your normal boot you would enter the leather. This is how we would go to school.” Normally, an older boy led the students, because of the wolves. When blizzards, known as
buran,
came, they found their way by triangulating off telephone poles spaced every 150 feet near their route. They survived the long winters by eating fish caught during summers and cured with salt.

The story of the snowmaker also started in Siberia. In Russia, Avraham said, “there was a Jewish engineer by the name of Alexander Zarchin. This engineer was a Zionist. Being a Zionist and being a technologist, the Soviets sent him to one of the gulags, the same one as my father. And in Siberia it’s very cold, but the summer did not have any rain. The gulag was close to the Arctic Ocean.” The labor camp needed a source of drinking water. So in the summer, Avraham said, “they would open a gate and let seawater enter a lagoon. At the end of summer, they would close the gate, and the upper layer of the lagoon would freeze.” When it did, the salt and water were forced apart. “By nature, ice crystals from seawater are pure water,” he explained. When summer came again, the surface began to melt, flushing any residual brine from the ice pack, and Zarchin and the other prisoners began pumping liquid from the saline depths of the lagoon. They measured its salt content as they pumped, and once it was low enough, Avraham said, “they closed the gates and let the sun melt the rest of the ice—and they had drinking water.” He looked at us proudly. “So you see,” he said, mangling the phrase I would soon hear everywhere in Israel, “need is the father of invention.”

After the war, Avraham was allowed to return to Poland, then smuggled with a group of Jewish children, Holocaust survivors, across the Alps to Italy—and eventually to the newly declared state of Israel. Alexander Zarchin, his future boss, also fled from the gulags to Israel, where he soon found fame as an inventor. In 1956, the country’s first prime minister, the water-obsessed David Ben-Gurion, gave Zarchin a quarter-million dollars to build a pilot desalination plant. In 1960,
Look
magazine declared that what was being called the Zarchin process could “have more significance than the atomic bomb.” Zarchin’s trick was to replicate the Siberian freeze using a vacuum chamber: when pressure drops below four millibars, chilled salt water becomes ice, and thus becomes desalinated. His project, eventually incorporated as the for-profit IDE, became a vehicle for both capitalism and nationalism. “He wrote down the patent when he saw that the country needed water,” said Avraham. “Most of Israel was a desert at that time, but in the Bible the country was full of trees. You read that the son of David, Absalom, he was running away on a horse, and his hair got caught by the branch of a tree, and this is how he was killed.” Avraham gestured out a window toward his lush garden. “We decided we were going to make this country look like it did before,” he said. “And the people who came from Eastern Europe and other places, they wanted to convert it into something that reminded them of where they had lived before.”

When foreign investors came, a nervous Zarchin covered his machines’ dials with cloths, determined that no one should steal their secrets, or his profits. But vacuum desalination was quickly supplanted by more efficient reverse-osmosis techniques, and it took IDE forty years to find a real use for the Zarchin process. The eureka moment—this one belonging to Avraham—came in South Africa, where an IDE vacuum-ice machine was commissioned to help cool the world’s deepest gold mine, two miles below the surface of the Earth, where workers faced 130-degree temperatures.

It was back in 2005, Moshe explained. He and Avraham were in South Africa on a site visit, testing out the mine’s newest machine. Avraham saw a pile of snow produced in the heat of the African sun, and his eyes lit up. “Moshe, get me some skis,” he commanded. Moshe went into Johannesburg and found some skis. “At lunch, he had a big exhibition,” Moshe says. “I told him, ‘Avraham, I’m impressed you are a good skier for your age’”—he was seventy-two years old—“‘but before we take it to the Alps, let’s find a specialist.’ I looked for one on the Internets.”