Dirt muddying the otherwise pristine alabaster fur of a polar bear as it ambles down a snowless plateau. A once vibrant swath of orange and red coral bleached to a ghastly white.  The prone body of a seal slick with salt water lying parallel to a crumbling sheet of ice.

These are not the opening lines of a new dystopian young adult novel. These are the effects of climate change.

But have no fear, dear reader. Although our planet is warming before our very eyes, the United States of America is leading the charge for conservation. Together we will stand in solidarity with the rest of the globe to protect our environment and defend everything that we are and everything we can hope to inherit.

Just kidding.

Instead, our Commander-in-Chief and his cabinet have decided to slash the budgets of the agencies on the forefront of battle against climate change. According to the blueprint released two months ago, the federal department responsible for the conservation of natural resources and management of land–the Department of the Interior–is set to receive cuts amounting to approximately 12%, as reported by The Washington Post.   

The National Institute of Health will receive a budget cut of 18%. Funds dedicated to the development of renewable energy will be funneled into research for nuclear weapons, the Office of Science will lose $900 million, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will receive a mere 2/3 of its 2016 budget, according to figures published by The New York Times.

When we as a community are scientifically literate, we are able to make thoughtful and informed decisions about our health and daily lives. Whether we choose to implement these decisions is another discussion entirely, but thousands of people still took to the streets on Earth Day in the March for Science to remind us that the science doesn’t lie.

But we can’t protect the environment on our own. Oil companies spilling toxic sludge into our water systems and factories pumping hundreds of thousands of toxins into our air–these are two examples of environmental destruction that need to be prevented on a federal level.

The numbers themselves are appalling, but the potential consequences are worse.

The cuts to the EPA’s budget will effectively eliminate the Clean Power Plan and weaken the 1990 Clean Air Act, which work to lower carbon emissions to protect the ozone layer and keep our air clean. According to Marge Oge, former director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, by 2020 these policies are projected to prevent 230,000 deaths annually and over 2.4 million people who suffer from asthma will be able to breathe easier.

It was the EPA that funded research that discovered that people were dying of heart issues and respiratory illness due to exposure to harmful diesel exhaust. Since then, regulations have curtailed levels of diesel exhaust by 95%, which has effectively saved 40,000 lives every year.

For someone who claimed to be “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created,” Trump apparently has no qualms about reducing the EPA’s workforce by three thousand employees.

In Chicago, the $300 million budget allocated to preventing algae blooms and invasive species from interfering with the health of the Great Lakes will be reduced to a mere $10 million. How can Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick for EPA administrator––a man who once sued the very agency he now runs over the Clean Power Plan––claim that these cuts don’t mean that “clean air and clean water is not going to be the focus in the future”?

As the White House transitions from Trump’s first one hundred days to his next three and a half years, these policies will come to fruition. The fact that science has become a matter of policy, able to be misconstrued when bureaucratically convenient, is loathsome.

The steps we take to protect our environment and prevent further destruction should not be up for debate. Less death, less disease, and less destruction mean fewer dollars spent trying to tackle these issues. We need to continue to push back against these cuts and similar actions that cause our nation to regress–or we may feel the impact a whole lot sooner than we would like.