Aspen is suffering from climate change more than most people think. Two winters ago the town had a record amount of no snow. Many people canceled their vacation in Aspen because there weren’t going to be fireworks this year; there weren’t any fireworks because it was dry from not having snow from the winter before. Many people have said how their plans have completely changed due to the fact that there were no fireworks this year. People canceled their trips to aspen because 15 minutes of their vacation was canceled.
This summer was very hot, and people love to come here in the summer for the outdoors but what about the 80-degree weather that feels like 100 degrees.

Aspen has been making moves to help this problem. Anna Stonehouse, a writer from Aspen times said,

“The City of Aspen is making small, calculated moves in its march toward 2020, [at which point] the community [is supposed to] have reduced its local greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent below 2004 levels.”

Aspen has also recently taken plastic out of the recycling center, causing many tourists to question where their money is going. The City of Aspen used to spend half a million dollars on recycling plastic, so now nobody knows where that money is going to go.

Climate change is going to continue to affect our ski mountains too. Mike Kaplan, the CEO of SkiCo, stated that

“Climate change scientists are predicting more extreme variations in temperature and precipitation. The last two years were examples of that\; the winter of 2017-18 was very warm and dry, and total snowfall was the 2nd lowest we’ve seen in our 70-year history. 2018-19 was the opposite. It was very cold, and total snowfall was above average.e had our biggest continuous storm cycle at the end of February when we received over 100 inches in 9 days.”

The loss of snow between 2017 and 2018 affected SkiCo and their income because of how much snow blowing they had to do.

“Yes, we spent more on snowmaking in 17-18, but mostly because it was so warm that it was an inefficient winter for snowmaking. The colder it is, the more efficiently we can make snow. We also made more snow because we stockpiled to ensure we could stay open all winter,” Kaplan said.

The less snow we have, the fewer tourists we have, simple. The number of tourists buying ski passes has decreased due to the lack of snow, but with bad snow comes lower ski pass rates.
When Aspen doesn’t make money, they start picking and choosing what they are going to take money out of. For example, Aspen has now banned plastic from the local recycling center because it was $500,000 a year to recycle the plastic. What’s recycling without plastic? Our economy is going to keep being affected based off the tourists and the snow. No snow, no tourists, no tourists, no recycling, no recycling, sad climate.