Two days before the opening of the Winter Olympics in Cortina, Italy, Nikolai Schirmer, a Norwegian skier, handed the International Olympic Committee a petition signed by more than 21,000 people, many of them professional winter athletes including some Olympians. The “Ski Fossil Free” petition is demanding that the committee develop a report on “whether fossil fuel marketing is acceptable in organized winter sports.” 

According to the petition, global warming is making winters warmer and shorter, which is “killing winter sports.” The petition declares that “our societies don’t need fossil fuels” and alternatives are cheaper. “If we don’t transition away from fossil fuels to other less harmful sources we have no chance of combating the climate crisis,” the petition states. 

Gabriella Hoffman, outdoor writer and director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women, said the petition is odd considering that almost all the apparel and equipment that winter athletes use is made from petroleum products. 

“Most outdoor recreationists should be appreciative of petroleum byproducts because it makes their activities possible,” Hoffman told Just the News. 

Gratitude campaign for fossil fuels 

Most skis, for example, are made from wood and carbon fiber, which is made from oil, coal and polyacrylonitrile synthetic material. Polyacrylonitrile is made from propylene, a petroleum and natural gas byproduct, and ammonia, which is also made from natural gas. Ski poles are also made from carbon fiber. Nylon and polyester, which are found in almost all winter apparel, are made from petroleum. The petition doesn't mention this.

The petition is reminiscent of the time when Energy Secretary Chris Wright trolled winter-apparel retailer The North Face. In 2021, Wright was CEO of Liberty Energy, a Colorado-based oil and gas producer. A competitor of Liberty Energy, Innovex, had requested the apparel retailer to produce jackets with Innovex’s logo on it. North Face refused because it didn’t want to be associated with an oil company. 

Wright found the company’s refusal to be puzzling, considering every item the company sells is either made from petroleum-based materials or fossil fuel energy was used along the supply chains — or both. Wright responded by launching an advertising campaign, which included billboards, thanking North Face for being such a valuable customer of the oil and gas industry. 

Gold medal for hypocrisy

Just the News reached out to the campaign to ask if any of the athletes who signed the petition are boycotting products that are derived from petroleum or that used fossil fuel-based energy along the supply chain — or if any boycott is planned for the future. The campaign didn’t respond. 

Larry Behrens, communications director for Power the Future, an energy advocacy group, told Just the News that the petition signers get a “gold medal in hypocrisy.” 

“It’s hard to take lectures from self-described ‘influencers’ demanding everyone else sacrifice modern life while they jet around from continent to continent. Only in the hypocritical climate movement could people travel thousands of miles on jets, rely on diesel-powered snow groomers, heat lodges with natural gas, and then scream that fossil fuels are the problem,” Behrens said. 

The campaign website claims that the world would save $12 trillion globally by switching to alternatives. It links to an Oxford study that uses levelized cost of energy (LCOE) to arrive at its conclusions. The problem with LCOE is that it omits any of the costs associated with the intermittency of wind and solar. These include extra transmission lines, overbuilding of wind and solar farms, and battery storage. The metric has been widely criticized when used to compare intermittent energy sources with reliable fossil fuel-powered electrical generation. 

The study also pumps green hydrogen as a solution to the fossil fuel energy used in heavy industry. Green hydrogen is produced with water and is powered by wind and solar energy. Projects in Europe and the U.S. promising to create a market for the product have collapsed entirely, despite billions in subsidies poured into the industry.

Attempting to respond to Wright’s tongue-in-cheek campaign, North Face admitted that there are no viable alternatives to its petroleum-based synthetic materials. Instead, it vowed to transition all those materials to 100% recycled products by 2024. 

The goal didn’t go quite as planned. “We have made significant progress, and while we didn’t reach our original target of 100% by the end of 2024, 95% of our polyester, 80% of our nylon and 45% of our cotton for apparel was recycled, responsibly-sourced renewable or regeneratively grown in 2024,” the company explains on its website. 

"Another grift just dressed up in snow gear"

Strangely, the campaign website also insists that it’s “simply a lie” to say the world needs fossil fuels and argues people only use fossil fuels because of oil companies’ advertising. 

It then goes on to compare the claim that fossil fuels are currently indispensable to doctors telling patients that smoking is healthy. If using fossil fuels is like smoking tobacco, it’s reasonable to expect the 21,000 signers of the petition to agree to immediately boycott all products made from fossil fuels. Yet, there’s no indication that any of them have. And there is no indication that they travel via means not dependent on fossil fuel.

Behrens said that the lack of a boycott shows they know their sport is entirely dependent on the thing they want gone. “Winter sports exist because reliable energy keeps people warm, moves equipment, and gets athletes to the mountains in the first place. Let’s be clear: if they really believed in their outrage, they would host their next ski competitions over Zoom. Until then, this looks like another grift just dressed up in snow gear,” Behrens said. 

Hoffman said the campaign is trying to gain visibility in a period when the public is turning against the anti-fossil fuel, climate-crisis hysteria. A recent global survey of national priorities by Gallup found that climate change ranked lower than “don’t know/refused” responses, and well behind concerns about the economy, safety and food. 

“I think they're looking for attention by piggybacking off of the Olympics…They're looking to taint and make life miserable for fun stuff like outdoor recreation, which shouldn't be political,” Hoffman said. 

"Global warming" and "climate change" become conveniently interchangeable

Many media outlets are running with the alarm over global warming allegedly killing winter sports. The Associated Press, which receives funding from anti-fossil fuel advocacy groups, directly in support of its climate and energy reporting, ran an article Monday about 40-degree temperatures in Cortina.

The New York Times, on the other hand, can’t seem to decide if global warming is ending winter or making it much colder. As Chris Martz, a meteorologist, pointed out on X, the Times reported in March 2024 that last year’s “weirdly” warm winter had “climate fingerprints all over it.” Last week, the paper ran an article claiming that Winter Storm Fern was caused by climate change. 

Oddly, the March 2024 article recently vanished from the site, though it’s still listed on the author’s page. The Wayback Machine, an internet archive site, shows that it was available as recently as July 2025. 

While there is widespread agreement that temperatures are rising and carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to it, it’s not clear that global warming means the end of winter sports. But as evidenced by the lack of a boycott of fossil fuels among the petition signers, it seems clear they know that winter sports are not possible without petroleum. 

“I think that most outdoor recreationists are grateful to have plentiful resources which allow them to enjoy the outdoors comfortably, especially in cold temps,” Hoffman said.