Avast, ye salty dogs and ink-stained wretches! There’s a foul wind blowing from the Potomac, and it smells of burnt parchment and stubborn denial. It seems Donald Trump, the grand helmsman of the land-lubbers, has taken a cutlass to the very maps that tell us how high the tides are rising. By scrapping the research that calculates the cost of our soot and smoke, he’s essentially blindfolded the navigator while the ship of state hurtles toward a jagged reef of its own making. It’s a bold move, if ye consider madness to be a form of courage, but for those of us with boots on the deck, it looks like a recipe for a watery grave.

I cornered Quartermaster Quench near the grog barrel this morn, and he spat a wad of tobacco into the swirling brine. 'Cap’n,' he muttered, his eyes wide with the fear of the deep, 'if we stop looking at the clouds, the storms don't vanish; they just catch us with our breeches down. Scuttling the Environmental Protection Agency’s data is like tossing your compass overboard because you don't like that it points North when you want to head South.' And he’s right, me hearties! This research wasn't just ink on paper; it was the mathematical armor we used to justify keeping the bilge pumps running against the rising heat of the world’s oceans.

The high seas don't care much for politics, but they sure do respond to the math. By ignoring the 'Social Cost of Carbon,' the White House is pretending that the smoke from our cannons and the coal in our holds doesn't contribute to the melting of the great ice-walls in the North. Lord 'Smokey' Higgins of the Admiralty was heard laughing in the counting house, claiming that 'if we don't measure the fire, the insurance is cheaper.' Aye, but when the deck is charring under your boots, a cheap policy won't keep your toes from blistering! The lords are counting their gold while the sailors are counting the inches of water in the hold.

This isn't just about a few dusty scrolls; it’s a full-scale assault on the Scientific Community and their ability to warn the fleet of the encroaching kraken of Climate Change. Without these regulations, the big merchant companies and the coal-barons are free to dump their sludge into the great blue without paying a single copper in reparations. We’re looking at a future where the coastal waters of the United States boil like a tea kettle, and the hurricanes grow fat and angry on the ignored heat of the deep. It’s a pirate’s dream of chaos, perhaps, but even a pirate needs a port that isn't currently sitting five fathoms underwater to spend his hard-earned plunder.

So, batten down the hatches and prepare for a murky horizon, for the light of reason has been doused by a bucket of crude oil. When the charts are burned, every rock is a nasty surprise and every gale is a catastrophe that could have been avoided. We are sailing into the great unknown with a captain who thinks the horizon is a flat line and the leviathan is a fairy tale told to scare children. May the gods of the sea have mercy on our souls, for the men in charge have traded our sails for a handful of soot and a promise of 'greatness' that looks suspiciously like a shipwreck on the horizon.