Climate change: Colorado companies are taking the lead in making today's business world a place where profit and planet co-exist.

• Author: Best, Allen

While meeting with the staff of the Alpine Bank at Snowmass Village three years ago, a long-time employee asked Dave Scruby a question he couldn't answer: "Why aren't we environmentally minded?"

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"As I drove back from Snowmass I began to feel, quite frankly, embarrassed," said Scruby, vice chairman of the Glenwood Springs-based chain of 33 banks. "We live in these beautiful communities, and we take a lot, but don't give a lot back."

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Scruby then initiated a dialogue with employees that, despite some floundering, ultimately has produced changes--mostly reducing energy use--that are not only good for the environment, but for Alpine and all the communities Alpine Banks do business in, from Frisco to Telluride to Fruita.

Like Alpine Banks, many Colorado businesses have been re-embracing the environment during the last several years. High-end real estate developers have begun to consider LEED certification, an environmental rating for their operations, as simply an assumed cost of doing business. Many Fortune 500 companies have already reaped benefits of energy conservation, and now are looking for higher forms of turning their companies "green."

Yet, you will seldom see the word "environmentalism" used in this new marriage of "green" and the business world. Environment? Yes. And also sustainability, an elastic word that speaks both to the environment and to economic viability, which means profit making, and sometimes even to cultural and demographic continuity. The word "environment" in the business world implies a longer vision than the corporation's quarterly report, and it suggests always that what profits are made by a company are not made at the expense of future generations. This new emphasis on sustainability also takes an inclusive view of community, and it involves a broader view of what actually constitutes a company's success.

Clearly, when it comes to the environment, the corporate ground is shifting--and fast. Richard Kelly, the chief executive officer of Xcel Energy, says it's time utilities acknowledge global warming and begin dealing with it. "Green" building has in many minds become a prerequisite for high-quality office and residential construction. Resort operators have been stampeding to buy wind energy credits. Vail Resorts won a public-relations coup when it announced its new environmentally protective program with both liberal U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, a Democrat, and former Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, in the same photo with Vail CEO Rob Katz. The story, given sopping amounts of ink by Denver's daily newspapers, was also given prominent play in The New York Times.

Public perceptions are driving these business changes. Energy has elbowed aside open-space preservation, sprawl and recycling as core environmental issues nationally and locally. People worry about dependence on foreign oil, now accounting for 66 percent of U.S. consumption, and some fret that world oil production may begin to decline just as U.S. production did, beginning in 1970.

Global warming was recognized across the world as a serious challenge for governments even before U.S. political voices who signed on to the issue had gained any traction with American business. But now global warming is powerfully driving change. We've heard of polar bears drowning for lack of ice, and we've read about steadily increasing annual mean temperatures--and now our reading has become consistent with what we see out our kitchen windows: huge amounts of snow in winter, dried-out lawns in summer, and increasingly intense storms that can disrupt lives overnight. He-said, she-said journalism between proponents and skeptics of global climate change, such as cropped up in Denver papers last summer, suddenly seems as archaic as the backyard privy long gone. Any room left for argument has been left around the edges: Will the West be hotter and much drier, for example? Or hotter and a just little drier? Will Colorado ski areas benefit in the short term? Or endure postage-stamp seasons in the long run?

And the stakes, as that last prospect suggests, have never been higher. The fundamental realignment of business threatened by global warming and an unhealthy dependence on fossil fuels is likely to dwarf changes provoked by a raft of federal laws in the 1960s and early 1970s, and also the energy savings of a slightly later era. The changes being made by today's businesses are incremental, but they are now being...