They take the “business” tack because you can more easily put a value to it, they can show loss. Future pain and suffering and broad “human rights” arguments are more nebulous to a court of law ruling on a specific complaint. And courts only rule on the specifics of a case. “How is this action hurting you ATM or in the near future?” And prove it, with numbers and stuff.

Does that make sense? Courts are not interested in feelings or possible futures. The plaintiffs made a solid argument with, “This is hurting our business now, and by denying us planning, clearly hurts us in the short-term.” And no one is going to argue that farming isn’t a business with a short-term planning needs.

Pretty funny that farmers, insurance companies and the military recognize climate change as an immediate and future issue. Must be woke. MAGA!

Business/Insurance is a great reason to have federal climate reporting. There is no good reason to have it duplicated at every state, insurance, farm level. It is a massive savings/benefit to have it centralized.

That’s honestly the only argument that matters right now, unfortunately.

There were still copies in the National Archives. Just not readily available to the public, and more importantly, not getting updates.

There was probably some data backup. But they department probably did the thing they usually do when told to remove something: Restrict or remove public acces, it’s pretty common on government websites. There’s also a high likelyhood that the goons didn’t check for all the backups if they went in themselves.

As an example, just the other day I was looking for some data with all scripts and such turned off in the browser, when I landed on a twenty year old page that was replaced around fifteen years ago but they only added a redirect and replaced the link on the public pages. Found it through some archived links, and the rest of the page was still all there just without images, and with several working links.