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The stickers are on tailgates. The logos are on coffee bags, beer cans, brand websites, athlete pages, and summit stages. Protect Our Winters is the most successful moral marketing campaigns the outdoor industry has ever produced, and the whole ecosystem glows with the warm certainty of people who believe they are on the right side of history, and maybe they are.
However, being on the right side of history is not the same thing as being honest about the problem, useful in solving it, or effective at allocating capital against it. That distinction is where this piece begins.
Truth be told, I have wanted to write this for over a decade and could never find the right thread to pull on. Part of that is the subject itself: climate sprawls, touching everything from geopolitics to industrial policy, and it resists honest treatment in a few thousand words, or even a few books. The other part of it is POW itself and its stature in the space. Inside the outdoor industry, POW is not merely treated like a nonprofit, it is treated like a moral institution, and moral institutions do not tend to welcome criticism, from outsiders or, from what I can tell, from within.
For the record: I am not a climate denier. I have spent over twenty five years inside the industry as an analyst, operator, shop rat, media guy, entrepreneur, and athlete. I live in a mountain town, my happiness is disproportionately tied to how much it snows, and I have personally watched the snowpack I depend on get weirder. I am, demographically and emotionally, the exact person Protect Our Winters was built to represent.
I also cannot help but look at organizations through the lens of finance, incentives, and capital allocation. POW is a nonprofit, but it still sells something; it raises money, pays employees, builds a brand, recruits customers, signs partnerships, and claims to be solving a problem. All of this makes it analyzable like a business.
So that is what I am going to do; POW is going to get the same treatment I have given Fox Factory, Vail Resorts, DJI and GoPro in these pages: business description, product analysis, revenue model, key metrics, comps, return on invested capital, and risks. The effectiveness of any organization comes down to how well it allocates capital against the problem it claims to solve and nonprofits are no exception. If anything, the bar should be higher, because nonprofits do not face a true loss function. A company that ships a useless product gets killed by the market whereas a nonprofit with a weak theory of change can survive for years on good vibes, brand partnerships, and donor intent.
One thing before we start. Environmental advocacy is not a problem, dishonest environmental advocacy is. Honesty is not a moral nicety here but rather is a prerequisite for pricing the problem, and you cannot allocate capital against a problem you have been told is simple. Everything that follows is downstream of that.
Let’s dig in.
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Business Description
Protect Our Winters is a Boulder, Colorado 501(c)(3) founded in 2007 by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones, with an affiliated 501(c)(4), the Protect Our Winters Action Fund, created in 2018. Its stated mission is to turn the “Outdoor State,” a claimed 181 million Americans who recreate outside, into a climate voting bloc.
Before looking at what POW has become, it is worth looking at what it said it was at the beginning. The original mission statement, pulled from POW’s 2007 website and still present for at least several years, read as follows:
Protect Our Winters (POW) is a tax exempt, non-profit organization dedicated to reversing the global warming crisis by uniting the winter sports community and focusing our collective efforts towards a common goal.
Climate change is a serious issue for all of us who are passionate about our winter sports and in some cases, it’s how we make our living. If we harness our collective energy and put forth a focused effort, we can have a direct influence on reversing the damage that’s been done and ensure that winters are here for generations behind us.
The original promise was not simply awareness, education, storytelling, or community building. It was to help reverse the global warming crisis by organizing the winter sports community around a common effort. Fast forward to today, and POW’s operational footprint looks something like this:
- Lobby days in Washington
- Climate-messaging training for athletes, brand employees, and creatives through its Alliance program.
- Grants to roughly five to ten athlete-led films per year.
- A summit.
- Digital petition campaigns against selected targets.
- Merchandise.
- A 2024 get-out-the-vote campaign built around Strava challenges and film festivals.
- An Action Fund that spends five figures per election cycle on independent expenditures.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this, this is an advocacy organization. POW train messengers, organize supporters, create content, lobby policymakers, and try to influence elections.
However, which of these activities touches carbon, policy, or votes in a quantity that can be measured? That is the first real analytical problem I have long squinted at. POW’s modern operating model appears to be advocacy about advocacy. It trains messengers, funds content about messengers, and gathers messengers in rooms with other messengers. The theory of change may exist, but the measurable conversion mechanism is much harder to see.
In a normal business, you can usually follow the chain from dollars spent to product shipped to customer behavior to revenue. With POW, the chain is much foggier: dollars become campaigns, campaigns become awareness, awareness supposedly becomes political will, and political will supposedly becomes climate policy (someday, somehow) which maybe works.
However, if its does, POW should be able to show it. Peter Drucker’s line is overused because it is useful: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” and if an organization cannot measure the thing it claims to produce, then donors, partners, and the industry around it should be honest about what they are actually funding.
Revenue Model: What Is Actually Being Sold, and to Whom?
POW’s revenue reached approximately $6.7 million in its most recent fiscal year, up from under $200,000 in 2012. That is a real growth story, and nineteen years of growth usually means some kind of product-market fit which begs the question, what is the product?
Spoiler alert, its not policy. We will get to the policy numbers shortly, and they are almost comically small. If we follow the money from customer to deliverable and the model resolves pretty cleanly.
Brands pay for a halo. Patagonia, The North Face, Burton, CLIF, resort operators, and dozens of others sponsor POW through published partnership tiers. In exchange, they get the logo, the co-branded campaigns, and the right to signal climate seriousness to a customer base that increasingly demands it. Priced against what an agency would charge for comparable cause-marketing credibility, POW is a bargain. That is not a side effect of the model, it literally is the model.
Athletes receive a halo. The Athlete Alliance converts climate association into personal brand value, which can then convert into sponsorship value. POW’s grants fund films led by and starring its own athletes, so donor money helps subsidize athlete content, and those athletes carry the halo back to the same brands writing partnership checks. The loop closes neatly and every node captures value. Very little of that value is denominated in carbon or votes.
Donors receive absolution. This is the retail product.
The individual donor is buying relief from a real and painful dissonance: I love a sport that runs on jet fuel, diesel, global supply chains, remote travel, and energy-intensive infrastructure, and I am afraid of what is happening to winter. The sticker, the membership, the film premiere, the athlete post, and the donation link all deliver the feeling that the problem is being handled. That feeling is genuine and 100% real, which is why people pay for it, but it may also be demobilizing, which is why it deserves scrutiny.
There is a five-hundred-year-old precedent for this kind of transaction that I’m sure the history buffs have already picked up on. The indulgence, in the Catholic Church, was a payment that relieved guilt while funding the institution that sold the relief.
Note carefully what I am not saying, I am not saying climate concern is a religion. The fear is well founded with real data beneath it. The problem is real, even if there are many nuanced discussions to have around it. I am pointing at the payment structure: money in, relief out, conduct unchanged, institution strengthened.
This structure worked for centuries, until someone published an itemized critique of what the money actually bought (fueled by the printing press, which in a way is like an old school SubStack!).
Once you see the product, the anomalies stop looking like anomalies. Why content instead of policy? Because relief is delivered through story, not statute. Why so much attention on athletes, films, summits, stickers, and brand partnerships? Because the product is not simply climate action, it is moral alignment.
Most importantly, why has the organization failed to publish measured outcomes commensurate with the scale of its claims? Simple, the measurement threatens the product. The model works best when effectiveness is assumed rather than tested.
That is the uncomfortable possibility at the center of POW’s revenue model: it may not be failing at its mission. It may be succeeding completely at a mission it does not disclose.
The Mispricing Problem
The most challenging part of the climate movement is that, in many cases, there is no near-term substitute for hydrocarbons. The outdoor industry is no exception. An electric snowmobile matching a current mountain sled would weigh on the order of 1,800 pounds. Battery energy density does not follow Moore’s Law, and aviation, along with travel more broadly, runs on the same unforgiving marriage to physics. I have written about this before, and the arithmetic has not improved. Despite what Amie Engerbretson may want you to believe, we are married to a technological problem. Broad lobbying efforts alone do not change this.
I could do an entire post describing how leveraged our industry is to fossil fuels, but the short version is that the entire space, tip to tail, is heavily reliant on petrochemicals. In fact, it is almost impossible to find something that is not reliant on petroleum products in some way before you have it in your possession. What’s worse, for many of these items, there is no scalable, cost-effective substitute.
Culturally and economically, consumerism fuels the P&L of companies within the outdoor industry. These companies rely on people buying things they do not need in order to hit next quarter’s profitability forecast. I have yet to see the POW athlete get on stage and say, “I’ve decided to step away from working with [brand here] because we’ve made enough jackets, and selling you a new one every year is not the message I want to be a part of. This is my contribution to the fight against climate change.”
But you won’t hear that.
I know this feels overly negative, but it is simple arithmetic, and it has not changed in the 15 years I have been waiting for more sustainable practices in the space; they have not arrived in any meaningful way. It also means the honest pitch was always hard to stomach: decarbonization is one of the hardest industrial and technological problems humanity has ever attempted, our sport is structurally entangled with it, and no sticker changes that.
POW chose the opposite pitch: “we just need political will.” This is not just a simplification, it is a complete mispricing, and every dollar raised on it was deployed against a fictional version of the problem.
To be precise, policy is not useless. The solar cost curve was bought with feed-in tariffs and industrial policy, batteries rode mandates and manufacturing credits, nuclear came from the government-funded Manhattan Project. Policy that funds deployment and R&D can literally move physics, and I am a huge believer in these state-sponsored projects. We absolutely need them.
However, policy theater that funds films and lobby-day photo ops moves nothing. POW appears to do almost exclusively the second kind.
Both Sides of the Table
Jeremy Jones founded POW and remains its public face. Jeremy Jones also owns Jones Snowboards, which is a brand partner of the nonprofit its founder fronts. POW’s grant program funds films starring its own athletes, who are sponsored by its own partners. In a public company, the proxy statement would map these relationships as a matter of routine but in the nonprofit context, nobody (to my knowledge) has ever explicity drawn the map.
I am not alleging bad faith, and I don’t need to. The system is the story, and the helicopter is in a way the proof point. Jones famously gave up heli-skiing around 2010 and built a brand on foot-powered ascent which is genuinely admirable. That said, run the math: a day in a heli costs a skier something in the low hundreds of kilograms of CO2, while a single round trip to Japan or Alaska costs one to three tonnes per passenger. One film trip erases years of helicopter abstinence, and Jones knows it. He told ESPN in 2009 that roughly 70 percent of his footprint was airplanes, not sleds or helis, and told The Globe and Mail in 2016: “I am absolutely getting on planes. My biggest increase has been running this global company.”
The helicopter doesn’t really appear to be a carbon decision, it was a portfolio decision: divest the visible, photogenic emission, keep the invisible, load-bearing one, sell something more relatable (walking up hill). The name for such a thing is “optics arbitrage”, and it is the founding gesture of the entire enterprise which is to maximum visible virtue, minimum actual cost, emissions concentrated exactly where the business model needs them. Its a slight of hand, and while not completely dishonest, its also not acknowledging the situation in full clarity, either.
Key Metrics: The Measurement Void
Onto the numbers, this is where the brand and the filings part ways.
Political output. The POW Action Fund, the organization’s hard political vehicle, spent $72,389 on independent expenditures in the entire 2024 cycle. For scale, that is less than the budget of many competitive state legislative races. The Action Fund ended FY2024 with $11,415 in net assets and required a $400,000 grant from the 501(c)(3) to continue operating. Nineteen years, roughly $40 million of cumulative revenue, and the political arm remains financially dependent on the charitable entity it is supposed to complement.
Bipartisanship. POW brands the Outdoor State as a bipartisan bloc. Across the 2018, 2020, and 2022 cycles, the Action Fund spent a cumulative $279,024 on independent expenditures, 95.7 percent of it supporting Democrats or opposing Republicans. You can be a partisan shop but you cannot be a partisan shop wearing a bipartisan costume. In this case, it is what lets brands underwrite POW without openly picking a side in public.
Their own scoreboard. POW’s homepage states that its 2024 get-out-the-vote effort reached 7.5 million people and “wasn’t enough to turn the tide,” with only 7 percent of eligible Americans voting on climate. Credit the candor, briefly, then note what the sentence admits: the organization’s core theory of change, that outdoor recreation can be converted into climate voting, was tested at scale in the highest-stakes election of its life, and failed by its own accounting.
Overhead, and why it is a red herring. POW’s defenders will reach for the Charity Navigator screenshot, so let’s preempt it. Four stars, roughly 72 percent program ratio, executive pay within sector norms. To add, the books are clean, I have no reason to doubt that every dollar went where they said it would go.
However, the program ratio is an accounting artifact, because at POW, the programs are the issue. When your programmatic output is films, summits, trainings, content, campaigns, and convenings, the usual nonprofit distinction between program expense and administrative expense becomes much less useful. The question is not whether the money was properly categorized, instead, the question is whether the money produced a measurable outcome.
Roughly half of total expenses is payroll before you even reach grants and events. Pick any dollar in the most recent filing and trace it forward and it terminates in content, community, campaigns, or compensation. The rating measures whether money went where POW said it would go, which it did. However, where POW said it would go is the problem.
And then there is the void itself. You cannot manage what you do not measure (saying it for the second time). In nineteen years, I could find no randomized trial, no cost-per-outcome figure, no third-party effectiveness evaluation, nothing audited, nothing falsifiable. Not one number that would let a donor compare a dollar given here against a dollar given anywhere else.
For an organization whose modern premise is that it converts money into political outcomes, the absence of any serious attempt to measure that conversion is hard to read as an oversight but instead it looks like a feature of the model.
The Comps That Make It Worse
The strongest evidence against POW is not anything POW did, it is what the comps prove is possible. Put differently: there are alternatives, and they are good. They measure outcomes, which means they can improve.
The Environmental Voter Project does almost exactly what POW claims to do: mobilize environmental voters. The difference is that EVP has run hundreds of randomized controlled trials on its own programs since 2015 and publishes measured turnout lift. In fact, you can calculate what a marginal vote costs there.
Clean Air Task Force operates in policy and technology advocacy at far larger scale and sits at or near the top of nearly every serious effective-climate-giving list. Giving Green and Founders Pledge exist specifically to answer the question, “Did your dollar move carbon?” and they publish their answers annually.
POW appears on none of these lists, not criticized or debated but absent.
The climate-philanthropy evaluators whose job is to compare giving opportunities, groups like Giving Green, Founders Pledge, and Giving What We Can, have spent years looking across this landscape. As far as I can tell, Protect Our Winters has never emerged from that process as a recommended high-impact climate charity. That absence is not dispositive, but it matters. It establishes the opportunity cost plainly: every dollar given to POW is a dollar not given to organizations that can show, or at least seriously estimate, what the dollar bought.
One more comp, though this one is on the ideas side.
Nuclear power is the densest, most reliable zero-carbon energy source we have, and it is one of the most obvious answers to the energy-density problem that defines so much of this industry’s footprint. Yet a former POW board member is among the more prominent academic opponents of nuclear power, and at least two of POW’s international affiliates have signed statements opposing it outright.
An organization doing carbon math would be loudly pro-nuclear, or at minimum genuinely agnostic. An organization doing coalition politics tracks the coalition, and on this issue, POW appears to track the coalition, that is where my critique changes.
I no longer believe POW is merely useless. Useless is a zero, and I could live with a zero. But an organization that sells its audience the feeling that the problem is being handled, while lending the outdoor community’s credibility to politics that can slow or stigmatize the densest clean energy source we have, is not returning zero. It is returning less than zero.
It is drawing down an account the rest of us live on: the community’s trust, attention, and finite willingness to care. The relief demobilizes, the certainty crowds out honesty, and honesty was the scarce input all along.
Show Me the Incentive
By now an honest reader should be asking the obvious question. If the record is this thin, why does the organization persist? Nineteen years is a long time to run a machine that produces nothing measureable against the problem it purports to solve without somebody inside noticing, saying so, and forcing a reckoning. The answer is one of my favorite sayings in finance. Munger: show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. So lets map the incentives, node by node.
The staff are paid in salary and meaning: roughly half the budget, plus the sense of working on the defining problem of the age. As discussed earlier, the athletes are paid in halo: which is a way of increasing their social capital and the film grants convert donor money into their content. The brands are paid in credibility and image greenwashing at a fraction of agency rates, underwritten by a sincerity no agency could manufacture. The donors are paid in relief and “feeling good”. Every node, without exception, is additionally paid in identity: membership in the tribe that is fixing the planet.
Now notice what none of these incentives point at. Not one unit of compensation in this system, cash or psychological, is contingent on a tonne of carbon or a counted vote. The incentive is not to fix the problem, but rather, the incentive is to exist, because existing is what gets everyone paid. This is systemic in many non-profits, but its hard to find an organization where its worse than POW.
I want to be precise here, because this is the part that usually gets misread as cynicism. I am not claiming anyone at POW is lying but rather I am claiming something structurally worse: the system selects for sincerity. Upton Sinclair observed long ago that it is hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. It is harder still when it is not his salary but his identity. The people best able to believe in the mission are the ones who thrive in it, and anyone who starts running carbon math on the film budget quietly selects out. Nobody has to lie and the machine promotes the believers which is why the dishonesty is never owned: owning it would not cost anyone an argument, it would cost everyone who they are and even reduce the amount of money POW raises. This is absolutely critical for anyone reading this to understand, there is no forcing function of brutal honesty.
The incentive map also explains the strangest artifact in the file: the mission has a termination condition, but the business model does not. Watch the organization metabolize its own failure. The homepage concedes the 2024 effort “wasn’t enough to turn the tide,” and then, in the next breath: “The good news? We see that as an opportunity,” followed by a promise to double down for 2026. Read that as an analyst or capital allocator. A failed output, converted in one sentence into an expanded budget request. In any company I have covered, that construction in a shareholder letter is a red flag. Here it is the pitch, and it works, because the customers were never buying outcomes. Failure does not threaten this organization, failure is inventory.
The Intellectual Honesty File
Two exhibits, both from POW’s own record, both recent.
Exhibit one. In October 2023, POW ran a petition campaign against FIS, the international ski federation, over glacier preparation for early-season World Cup races. Real photos of excavators on the Theodul Glacier existed and were part of the story, but POW’s campaign also used a 2019 WWF Austria photograph of the Pitztal Glacier, a different glacier, a different year, no connection to the World Cup, and the photographer confirmed as much to press. FIS responded publicly: POW had been briefed on FIS’s actual sustainability work in a meeting on October 13, 2023, launched the campaign anyway, and was, in FIS’s words, “deliberately misleading the public using false information” with a petition that “serves only to splinter the winter sports community rather than unite it.” POW’s defense was that the old photo was “a clear example” of the general phenomenon; it swapped the image and moved on. Set aside what you think of FIS, this isn’t a good look: the target was chosen for virality, the strongest image was borrowed from a different mountain, and when caught, the defense was that the facts were illustrative of the values not a total fessing up to what was going on here.
Exhibit two. In 2024, after a POW athlete was fact-checked during Senate testimony, the organization published a blog post titled “It’s Okay to Get Stuff Wrong.” Its argument, verbatim: “while we might get facts wrong, we can’t get values wrong, so long as we are speaking about what we care about.”
There is nothing wrong with getting facts wrong; ‘I was wrong’ might be the most credible sentence in advocacy, and an organization that said it plainly would have my respect. That is not what this post says, however. It says accuracy is optional so long as the values are right, which inverts the entire structure of credibility: being wrong is forgivable, deciding in advance that wrongness doesn’t matter is not. An advocacy organization whose only asset is trust formally instructed its advocates that facts are negotiable and sincerity is the deliverable. That post is not an embarrassing slip but rather it is the honest disclosure of the business model.
To add, it names the thing that has bothered me for a decade: why people with nuanced views on climate, people who take the problem seriously precisely because they understand how hard it is, feel alienated by POW rather than represented by it. Nuance is a defect in this product, the tent was never big and if you asked hard questions, you were not in it.
There is now a genre, funded by POW grants and listed on its own homepage, called imperfect advocacy: films in which athletes wrestle on camera with the dissonance of their fossil-fueled lives and resolve it in favor of continuing. I watched this genre get invented in real time (and critiqued it). What began as one athlete’s coping mechanism is now an institutional content category with a grant line. The discomfort was never confronted, it was productized.
Risks to the Thesis: What Would Change My Mind
I am demanding falsifiability from POW, so I owe you mine.
Here is what would move me:
- If POW published a randomized controlled trial of any program showing measured turnout or persuasion lift.
- If it published a cost-per-outcome figure, any outcome, audited by anyone.
- If it shifted a meaningful fraction of its budget from content and events to interventions with a counting mechanism attached.
- If it criticized a paying partner by name, once, on anything material.
- If it went formally agnostic on energy generation sources and let the carbon math lead.
Any one of these would matter and if POW did one of them, I would write the follow-up and be fully honest about where my critique had been wrong or incomplete.
Now note the current status of every item on that list: over nineteen years, zero occurrences. The incentive map is predictive here, item by item. For instance, an RCT risks a null result, which risks the brand. A cost-per-outcome figure invites comparison shopping, and POW likely loses the comparison. Criticizing a paying partner costs a check. Going agnostic on nuclear costs the coalition, and the coalition is the identity. Every act that would falsify this piece is an act the organization is structurally paid not to perform.
To steelman the other side honestly, POW will likely point to the Inflation Reduction Act and its lobby days around it. However, the IRA passed through reconciliation arithmetic and one senator’s dealmaking. Claiming causal credit for the largest climate bill in American history on the strength of athlete fly-ins is precisely the kind of unmeasurable attribution this piece is about.
They will point to the four-star rating. Addressed above.
They will point to awareness. But climate awareness in the outdoor community was not the binding constraint in 2007, and it is certainly not the binding constraint now. If anything, awareness is the one problem POW actually solved, or more likely, the one problem that was already solving itself.
Coda: The Speech Nobody Has Given
I want to end with the version of this organization that could have existed, because one person is uniquely positioned to build it: the founder.
Jeremy Jones has more credibility in snowsports than almost anyone alive. Imagine him standing on the summit stage and saying something like this:
This sport runs on fossil fuels, and there is no near-term physics that changes that. We are all entangled, me most of all. My company ships snowboards around the world, and my carbon footprint is not small. We cannot fix the climate with a few million dollars, and we will stop implying that we can. So here is the narrow, measurable thing we will do with your money this year. Here is exactly how we will count it. And here is the annual report where we will show you whether it worked, including if it did not.
Nobody in the outdoor industry has ever given that speech, but I would be giving a standing ovation from the back.
It would cost something, which is how you would know it was real. It would alienate some partners, embarrass some athletes, and shrink the audience. It would also, for the first time in nineteen years, be worth funding. More than that, it would signal a return to the punk-rock, first-principles thinking that has been absent from the outdoor industry for at least a decade.
Radical honesty is not the enemy of environmental advocacy. It is the only version that can allocate capital toward things that might matter: precise problems, measured interventions, published failures, and technologies that change the arithmetic instead of the mood.
Until then, memetic action continues. The stickers will keep shipping. The films will keep premiering. The summit will keep convening. High-dollar roles will keep getting posted. And winter will keep not being protected by the people who trademarked protecting it.
About the Author
Jeff Brines is an entrepreneur, finance and product operator, software builder, and longtime outdoor-industry participant based in the Mountain West. He has spent roughly twenty years around the outdoor industry as an analyst, operator, media contributor, athlete, and customer, and writes about business, incentives, technology, markets, and the uncomfortable gap between what industries say they are doing and what their numbers suggest they actually do.
Sources & Citations
Primary financial documents
Protect Our Winters, IRS Form 990 filings, EIN 20-8474909, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/208474909
Protect Our Winters Action Fund, IRS Form 990 filings, EIN 82-3030363, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/823030363
POW Action Fund, FEC committee page, Committee ID C90017898:
https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C90017898/
POW Action Fund independent expenditure history, OpenSecrets:
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/protect-our-winters-action-fund/C90017898/independent-expenditures/2018
Note: Change the year in the OpenSecrets URL to view each election cycle. InfluenceWatch can be useful as a pointer, but the FEC and OpenSecrets pages should be cited directly.
POW’s own statements
Protect Our Winters homepage:
Protect Our Winters, “Stoke The Vote”:
https://protectourwinters.org/campaign/stoke-the-vote/
Alex Lee, “It’s Okay to Get Stuff Wrong,” Protect Our Winters:
https://protectourwinters.org/its-okay-to-get-stuff-wrong/
Protect Our Winters, Climate Advocate’s Guidebook:
https://protectourwinters.org/news/climate-advocates-guidebook/
The FIS episode
International Ski and Snowboard Federation, “FIS response to POW Petition,” October 2023:
https://www.fis-ski.com/inside-fis/news/2023-24/fis-response-to-pow-petition
TownLift, “FIS accuses POW petition of deliberately misleading the public,” October 2023:
https://townlift.com/2023/10/fis-refutes-pow-petition-claims-of-climate-inaction/
Protect Our Winters Europe, Open Letter to FIS, February 2023:
https://protectourwinters.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/FIS-open-letter-230209.pdf
Unofficial Networks, POW response defending the disputed photo as “a clear example”:
https://unofficialnetworks.com/2023/10/26/world-cup-environmental-effects/
The DARE parable
Note from jeff: I removed this before publishing, but fun stats are still in here that are very illustrative of how DARE realized they weren’t impacting the problem in the mid 90s, but the program continued anyway because…vibes.
U.S. General Accounting Office, “Youth Illicit Drug Use Prevention: DARE Long-Term Evaluations and Federal Efforts to Identify Effective Programs,” GAO-03-172R, January 2003:
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-03-172r
West, S.L. and O’Neal, K.K., “Project D.A.R.E. Outcome Effectiveness Revisited,” American Journal of Public Health, 94(6), 2004:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.94.6.1027
Ennett, S.T., Tobler, N.S., Ringwalt, C.L. and Flewelling, R.L., “How Effective Is Drug Abuse Resistance Education? A Meta-Analysis of Project DARE Outcome Evaluations,” American Journal of Public Health, 84(9), 1994:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1615171/
Climate advocacy comparisons
Environmental Voter Project, “Our Results”:
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/results
Environmental Voter Project, “What We Do”:
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/about
Giving Green, “Top Climate Nonprofits,” 2025-2026 list:
https://www.givinggreen.earth/top-climate-nonprofits
Giving Green, “Giving Green Announces $26 Million for High-Impact Climate Solutions, 2025-2026 Top Climate Nonprofits, and New Grantees,” November 2025:
https://www.givinggreen.earth/post/2025-2026-top-climate-nonprofits
Jeremy Jones, travel, and related parties
Protect Our Winters, Jeremy Jones Athlete Alliance profile:
https://protectourwinters.org/alliance/jeremy-jones/
ESPN, “Boots Are Made for Walking,” 2009:
https://www.espn.com/action/news/story?id=3909319
The Globe and Mail, Jeremy Jones interview, November 2016:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/fitness/qa-with-jeremy-jones-pioneering-snowboarder-and-climateactivist/article32677553/
The Inertia, “Jeremy Jones Talks About ‘Purple Mountains’ and Finding Political Common Ground on Climate Change,” September 2020:
https://www.theinertia.com/environment/jeremy-jones-talks-about-the-film-purple-mountains-and-finding-political-common-ground-on-climate-change/
Adventure.com, Jeremy Jones essay on climate activism, April 2023:
https://adventure.com/jeremy-jones-snowboarder-protect-our-winters-climate-activism/
Ratings and skier demographics
Charity Navigator profile for Protect Our Winters, EIN 20-8474909:
https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/208474909
NSAA, Kottke End of Season and Demographic Report:
https://www.nsaa.org/Store/detail.aspx?id=4150
NSAA, Industry Stats:
https://www.nsaa.org/NSAA/Media/Industry_Stats.aspx
SlopeFillers, Dave Belin interview discussing NSAA demographic data:
https://www.slopefillers.com/dave-belin-growing-skiing/
SAM Magazine, “Statistical Disarray,” discussion of NSAA and SIA demographic figures:
https://www.saminfo.com/archives/2010-2017/2018/may-2018/statistical-disarray-in-2018
Note: Use the paid NSAA/Kottke report for any precise current household-income or demographic claims. The public sources above are useful for general context, but they are not a substitute for the paid report.
POW affiliates, nuclear energy, and Naomi Oreskes
Protect Our Winters Austria, “This Is POW AT,” partnership criteria excluding cooperation with nuclear-power companies:
https://protectourwinters.at/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/This-is-POW-AT.pdf
Kiko Network, open letter signed by Protect Our Winters Japan, “Nuclear energy that is neither ‘sustainable’ nor ‘green’ should not be included in the EU taxonomy,” January 2022:
https://kikonet.org/en/content/31121
Center for Biological Diversity, open letter to President Biden signed by Protect Our Winters NZ, April 2022:
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/energy-justice/pdfs/2022-4-27_Letter-to-Pres-Biden-re-End-Fossil-Fuel-Era-Accelerate-Transtion-to-Renewable-Energy.pdf
Oil Change International, civil-society letter to the IEA signed by Protect Our Winters Austria:
https://www.oilchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/CSO-letter-IEA-WEO2021.pdf
Protect Our Winters, POW Team page listing Naomi Oreskes as Emeritus Board:
https://protectourwinters.org/about-pow/pow-team/
Protect Our Winters, Climate Advocate’s Guidebook referring to Naomi Oreskes as a POW Emeritus Board Member:
https://protectourwinters.org/news/climate-advocates-guidebook/
Naomi Oreskes, “New Nuclear Power Plants Are Unlikely to Stop the Climate Crisis,” Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-nuclear-power-plants-are-unlikely-to-stop-the-climate-crisis/
Naomi Oreskes and M.V. Ramana, “The false promise of nuclear power in an age of climate change,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 2019:
https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/the-false-promise-of-nuclear-power-in-an-age-of-climate-change/
Physics and energy density
International Energy Agency, “Electric vehicle batteries,” Global EV Outlook 2026:
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2026/electric-vehicle-batteries
International Energy Agency, Global EV Outlook 2026:
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2026
U.S. Department of Energy, Alternative Fuels Data Center, Fuel Properties Comparison:
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/properties
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Transportation Energy Data Book:
Engineering ToolBox, “Fossil vs. Alternative Fuels, Energy Content”:
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fossil-fuels-energy-content-d_1298.html
Aviation and heli-ski emissions
ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator:
https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/environmental-tools/icec
ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator methodology:
https://icec.icao.int/Documents/Methodology%20ICAO%20Carbon%20Emissions%20Calculator_v13_Final.pdf
myclimate Flight Calculator:
https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new
myclimate, Flight Emission Calculator calculation principles:
https://www.myclimate.org/en/information/about-myclimate/downloads/flight-emission-calculator/
Travel and Climate, “Climate footprint of activities,” heli-skiing estimate:
https://travelandclimate.org/climate-footprint-of-activities
Heli.life, “An Honest Conversation About Heli Skiing, Emissions and the Environment”:
https://blog.heli.life/ski-ride/an-honest-conversation-about-heli-skiing-emissions-and-the-environment/
Powderguide, “Green heliskiing, are they serious?” discussion of Northern Escape Heli-Skiing carbon audit:
https://powderguide.com/en/magazine/schnee-von-morgen/snow-of-tomorrow-gr-nes-heliskiing-my-seriousness
Mountain Life, “How to Go Heli-Skiing and Not Be a Climate-Changing Jerk”:
https://www.mountainlifemedia.ca/2022/01/how-to-go-heli-skiing-and-not-be-a-climate-changing-jerk/
Maritime shipping and decarbonization
International Maritime Organization, “IMO’s work to cut GHG emissions from ships”:
https://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Cutting-GHG-emissions.aspx
International Energy Agency, “Aviation and shipping”:
https://www.iea.org/reports/aviation-and-shipping
International Energy Agency, “The Role of E-fuels in Decarbonising Transport”:
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/9e0c82d4-06d2-496b-9542-f184ba803645/TheRoleofE-fuelsinDecarbonisingTransport.pdf
MAN Energy Solutions, “Batteries on board ocean-going vessels”:
https://www.man-es.com/docs/default-source/marine/tools/batteries-on-board-ocean-going-vessels.pdf
RMI, “Maritime Decarbonization”:
https://rmi.org/maritime-decarbonization/
Reuters, “Global shipping industry sticks with green investments, despite carbon price delay,” February 2026:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global-shipping-industry-sticks-with-green-investments-despite-carbon-price-2026-02-12/
Reuters, “Hapag-Lloyd and NCL to power container ships with e-fuels from 2027,” December 2025:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/hapag-lloyd-ncl-power-container-ships-with-e-fuels-2027-2025-12-17/