In the legal battle over the Clean Power Plan that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which put the plan on hold last year, many of America’s biggest companies filed briefs in support of the plan. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft were in that camp, writing that while they are big consumers of electricity, they have all tried to limit their environmental impact because of concerns about climate change. Thus far, they have had to develop their own renewable energy facilities in order to meet their own goals, but the Clean Power Plan would provide them with more—cheaper—options, they argued. They also suggested that they want to take steps to protect the environment to forestall future natural disasters and global public health crises—events that would be both humanitarian and business disasters. “Delaying action on climate change will be costly in economic and human terms,” they argued.

When asked for comment Tuesday, Google referred The Atlantic to a joint statement from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft in March, when President Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of the Clean Power Plan. “We believe that strong clean energy and climate policies, like the Clean Power Plan, can make renewable energy supplies more robust and address the serious threat of climate change while also supporting American competitiveness, innovation, and job growth,” the statement read.

Consumer brands such as Adobe, Mars, Ikea, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts supported the plan too, writing that, as businesses that buy a large amount of power, they are sometimes challenged to find enough renewable-energy sources. The Clean Power Plan would have made it easier for them to meet renewable energy goals that they have already issued; revoking it will make that more difficult. Furthermore, they argued, the Clean Power Plan helped create a timeline for how the mix of energy sources would be changing in the future, which meant they could make plans taking those changes into account; repeal of it will create further uncertainty.

Dominion Resources, an energy company that operates Dominion Virginia Power, a utility that serves 2.4 million customers in Virginia and 100,000 in North Carolina, also filed a brief supporting the Clean Power Plan, in part because the way the state of Virginia was implementing the plan would allow the company to build more natural gas plants—something that would have meant that in the long run Dominion could have been ahead of other utilities in power-generation capacity. Wind and solar energy companies supported the plan, too.

“It was really just a small minority of businesses that were against it,” John Quigley, the former Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, told me. Quigley held hearings around the state about the Clean Power Plan, and told me that while coal companies and manufacturing associations were against it, utilities said they just wanted some sort of regulatory certainty, and gas companies stayed out of the debate. Overall, he said, about 80 percent of the comments received by the state of Pennsylvania were positive, though that also included comments from private citizens and advocacy groups.