Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but this kind of sounds like a technofascist trial balloon to push for the privatization of the US military. The implication being

Why can’t our nation’s air industry not simply buy the right to fly through no-fly zones? This is deep state oppression curtailing YOUR freedoms to go where-ever you please. If we just privatize military research and production it will be more productive (SpaceX is better than NASA) and American (a big state is communist; those military officers that don’t want to invade Canada are traitors), and people can fly over SpaceX’s latest acquisition Area 51X if they buy the rights.

Project 2025 was not written by Trump even if he is the executor/scapegoat. Smart people exist and work for the politicians, shareholders and lobbyists that shape current US policy. And trial balloons don’t need to be cleverly worked out, in the era of Trump you can just throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and pay private media to not make a story out of the rest. There’s a good chance this will come to nothing, but why wouldn’t a petty technocrat try to ingratiate himself to the new technofascist regime by offering a win-win.

Wouldn’t that cause it to melt faster?

The better the top layer is insulated, the less heat from sunlight dissipates into the cold glacier and stone beneath. This means that the same amount of absorbed heat brings more of the top layer to the melting point than in a less insulated situation. Once the snow has melted it will go back to the old rate, but 22 days of delay would be optimistic.

Assuming the albedo is the same. If the glaciers are grey from dust and debris, then fresh snow will probably increase the reflectivity, which means less sunlight is absorbed as heat, which would cause the snow to last longer. So maybe 22 days of delay would be pessimistic. Or the effects might cancel out.

I don’t know if the infrared and air-to-material heat conduction properties of glacier ice and snow are very different. It’s probably less significant than albedo and insulation.

So my guess as an amateur physics grad is that during a heat wave (where air-to-material conduction is the primary driver), snow would melt faster than glacier ice, while during a typical preindustrial arctic early spring (where absorption of sunlight is the primary driver) snow would melt slower than glacier ice.

tl;dr: climate science hard

The important question is what you (yes, you, the person reading this) are going to do.

Climate change has made farming more difficult and expensive, which has lead to more subsidies, which has to be expressed as taxes and government loans, which is distributed over the entirety of right-wingers cutting federal expenses and centrists failing to replace them. The same story holds true for other industries, whether it’s the cost to keep sweatshop workers from dying, the cost to grow cotton, the cost to replace services destroyed by forest fires or hurricanes or floods, etc. Capitalism finds alternative routes, but these always cost more. This directly affects your quality of life, but in a distributed stochastic way that you can’t directly point to.

So maybe you’ve suffered from longer waiting periods in the justice system, maybe you’re annoyed that inflation has wiped out a considerable portion of your purchasing power (whether capital or income), maybe a lack of infrastructure maintenance has caused potholes or train delays, maybe you could have gotten a well-paying job as a high speed rail engineer or some other forward-looking government project that was never funded, maybe you got food poisoning because FDA checks got cut, maybe the covid restrictions could have stayed in effect longer and someone you know wouldn’t have gotten sick or died.

It’s like a cruise ship that is taking on water, with all the ship’s engineers focused on keeping the ship as stable and upright as possible rather than patching the hole or bailing out the water. They work harder and harder until at some point not even the full might of our regulations and charity and hoarded resources are able to keep it steady. And then everything goes wrong at once.