Google Accused of Illegally Killing a Massive Forest for Its New Data Center Project
futurism.com
Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares of forest for new data centers in Finland without the required environmental assessments.
  • Shortstack@reddthat.comEnglish
    29·
    9 days ago

    As Finnish newspaper Kalevareported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments.

    Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors started clearing trees in the area months ago, raising the alarm bells at the Finnish Nature Conservation Association.

    “Either this is gross incompetence from Google’s Finnish project company, Tuike Finland Oy, or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both,” said the association’s chair, Hanna Halmeenpää, in a statement, as translated by Wood Central.

    For those who haven’t looked at it

    Google razed the forest without the environmental assessments to whether they could do that or not, aka ‘fuck your laws and the wildlife’

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.todayEnglish
      221·
      9 days ago

      Fine them $1 billion per tree. Seriously. It has to really hurt them, or it will just be “the cost of doing business.” It has to be bad enough that they must sell off a division or two, and their stock has to tank 33% or more, so they, and everybody else watching, takes a hard lesson from it.

      • foo@feddit.ukEnglish
        6·
        9 days ago

        Or start holding the decision-making executives criminally liable.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.todayEnglish
          11·
          6 days ago

          Keep saying that, convince others to your side, and keep sending the message that if they do nothing, well accept it, and the politicians will be perfectly happy to go along with it, and do nothing. Good job.

          Or you could threaten them with prosecution and prison every time they read what we say, and get the message that they’ve gone far enough.

          We have to make them AFRAID of us, before they’ll do what we want. You aren’t sending that message with cowardly posts like yours.

    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      It’s a bit more complicated. Tuike tried to argue that the project wouldn’t need that assessment as it wasn’t being done as part of commercially selling trees from a natural forest as a “natural resource” as the law was worded, and they tried to ask for a “case by case” exemption that would allow them to start the clearing without having to wait for the whole lengthy assessment process to go through the systems. That exception got rejected because “Forest nature does not only mean forests in their natural state, but also forests used for forestry” (the Finnish words being “luonnonvara”, “metsäluonto” and “luonnontilainen metsä”.)

      They might have been technically fine had they not sold any of the trees. But, I mean, what else can you do with 300 hectares of trees?

      Finnish source from HS.fi.