As the world burns: what will global warming do to the Bush ranch?

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie

IN APRIL, WHEN BRITISH PRIME MINISTER Tony Blair went down to Crawford, Texas, to powwow with George W. Bush, the cowboy president couldn't wait to show off his brush-clearing skills and drive Blair around his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel ranch. Nature had other ideas. Instead of enjoying the usual balmy spring weather, Crawford was inundated with rain, including an unusually severe thunderstorm and hail the size of golf balls, that forced the prime minister to stay indoors for pecan pie. Blair had to drive to the nearest airport to depart rather than taking the official chopper.

The Rev. Larry Wood, a self-proclaimed Internet evangelist who tracks the "divine viewpoints" of various weather events, declared the freak storm a curse on the president for his failure to support Israel. (Bush had recently criticized Ariel Sharon.) Others drew an alternate explanation for the odd weather: global warming. But that possibility apparently seemed as remote to Bush as the likelihood that the storm was a sign from God. Shortly afterwards, Bush proposed easing enforcement of clean air regulations for the nation's dirtiest power plants, the country's primary producers of greenhouse-gas emissions. By easing up on such emissions, Bush may be endangering the one place where he actually seems to care about the environment: his Crawford ranch.

In 1999, even as he was dismissing conservation measures for the rest of the country, Bush was building rainwater collection systems and passive solar designs into his ranch house. While his own kids have questioned the sanity of wanting to vacation in a place whose most famous area neighbor is the Branch Davidian compound, the president goes to Crawford every chance he gets. He likes nothing better than to harness up the Jeep and drive foreign dignitaries around the ranch to point out the native wildlife among the oak groves (although Vladimir Putin's November tour was also washed out).

But the wildlife that Bush so enjoys is imperiled by unchecked global warming. Because of its topography, Texas is second only to California among the states likely to be the hardest hit by climate change. "What George Bush seems to be oblivious to is that global warming promises to make a lot of trouble for this state," says Peter Altman, director of the SEED project, an environmental group in Austin.

Bush's security people may be able to cordon off Prairie Chapel from the rest of the world, but they're powerless against the planetary...