alt Hacker NewsClimate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it
Comments
Partisan politics aside, frankly, anything data the government publishes like this should be public domain by virtue of it being published by the government.
How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?
What if government websites were distributed & archived as a default, from the beginning? Think IPFS as a first target for publication, "normal web" only as a mirror.
Is it feasible?
Should we push for this default?
First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.
> The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for.
Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
Blog post from a few weeks ago: https://www.climate.us/news-features/feed/climateus-launches... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689182)
With the AI rush, it all makes sense why suddenly all Silicon Valley became pro Trump and anti climate overnight.
This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
They may have, unfortunately, proved DOGE's point. The new climate.gov probably costs a fraction of the old one.
I'm glad someone managed to save the data that we all payed for.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.