Global warming, by definition, impacts the entire planet. But warming will likely have differing impacts on different areas. What does that mean for the climate of the American West?

A report prepared by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council last month boiled the answer down to three words: hotter and drier.

In 1996, the Forest Service described the 1.8 million acre Rio Grande National Forest, which rings the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, as "large … and … essentially undeveloped."

The agency expected things to stay that way, at least as far as petroleum extraction was concerned. An analysis of the management plan the Forest adopted that year concluded "development of oil and gas is not likely" by 2011.

And for the dozen years since that analysis, not a single acre of the Rio Grande NF was leased for oil development. That’s about to change. On May 8, the Bureau of Land Management (which manages federally-owned minerals) will put up for bid 144,000 acres of the Forest for oil and gas drilling.

Global warming is clearly one of the pre-eminent environmental challenges of our time. Yet, when some federal regulators are presented with an opportunity to meet the challenge, they prefer to do nothing.

Case in point: the expansion of the West Elk mine northeast of Paonia in Colorado. There, Arch Coal wants to expand its underground coal mining operations under a roadless area. Let's ignore that burning coal is a major source of heat-trapping global warming gases. To safely mine the coal in the expansion zone, Arch Coal must get rid of the explosive methane in the seam. To do that, Arch will drill hundreds of wells and simply vent the valuable methane directly into the air. That's a global warming problem because methane is one of the most powerful GW gases, trapping heat 20 times more effectively than CO2.

The movie "Three Kings" (1999), which follows a trio of American soldiers involved in the first Gulf War, contains an apt, if heavy-handed, metaphor about America's dependence on oil: an Iraqi torturer forces the black goo down an American prisoner's throat, making him gag.

Once upon a time, in a far-away rectangular state, there was a power source so pure it left no waste and would never run out. And from it sprang the modern environmental movement, not to welcome it, but to kill it dead.

Not quite the fairy-tale ending, eh? But the proposed Echo Park Dam, using the pure waters of the Green and Yampa Rivers to serve hydro-electric generation in Utah, had costs. The reservoir behind the cement plug would have swamped Dinosaur National Monument's redrock canyons in northwest Colorado. The Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Wallace Stegner and others built public support in the 1950s to deep-six that dam (at the expense of Glen Canyon... but that’s another story) and in so doing built a new political force.

Since the 1930s—following decades of shooting, trapping, and poisoning—Colorado has been a wolf-free zone. There are two ways wolves can return to Colorado: with human help, or under their own power.  The Department of the Interior over the last few months made decisions calculated to block both avenues of return.

The Bush Administration's hostility to environmental protection is not news. But seeing the numbers in black and white (or, as in this chart, in red and green) is startling. Created by the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, it shows that the President's budget for the Interior Department—which manages national parks, national wildlife refuges, and endangered species protection—was cut by a sixth in real dollars over the last eight years. By the same measure, EPA's budget has been cut by more than a quarter, and the Forest Service saw its budget aside from fire-fighting cut by more than a third.

The old energy economy—oil and gas—is booming in Colorado, driven by high prices and the Bush administration's push to aid America's addiction to fossil fuels. Thousands of new wells have been drilled—many on public land—and ranches, hunting opportunities, wildlife, air quality, public health, and the wildness of the West have all suffered.