Finland has a lot of people who care about forest and Finland needs to pay fines for EU if they don't have enough forest to suck CO2 from the air.

Google cut corners here, and didn't ask for the needed permissions. And the prime minister doesn't want to show his conversation with Google regarding this.

People are really pissed.

Edit: and the electricity prices are going up due to these data centers. And the profits from them don't stay in Finland, but go to American corporations. There should be Finnish data centers owned by Finns instead of having Google to take the cheap electricity and taking profits out.

Same thing with data centres in Norway. We're planning to waste heaps of our renewable energy on generating profits for a small cabal of assholes in SV. For what? Luckily there's been more political pushback against it here recently, but it's so tame. Just for once I'd like to see some conviction. Pause all ongoing constructions, and launch corruption probes into all the local politicians that pushed this stuff through. I bet there's lots of corruption there. On a national level, we don't have corruption on anything near the systemic scale you see in the US. Some bad apples, and lots of mole hills made into mountains by the press, but nothing like the US where it seems like most of congress is pretty much openly corrupt.

Local politicians though? Oh boy. Seems like every time there's some ongoing project in a smaller municipality involving commercial exploitation of natural resources(like undeveloped land, minerals, hydropower capacity, etc) there's a mayor and/or municipal council members who profit from it financially or otherwise. They have shares/board seats in a holding company owning the land, local contractors, etc. Seems like this is very widespread, and rarely leads to serious consequences, and even when it does, it happens so late that the project is already built, or so far underway it doesn't get stopped. Shit pisses me off.

I'm sure data centres are no different. Because I can't imagine a cost-benefit analysis of them that makes any sense from the point of view of the local community.

Well if it's any consolation, the profits from the datacenters go to a handful of Americans. People are just as pissed about them here.

Right, I think if we all had the same transparency, regulatory oversight, and involved electorate, we'd be as concerned with the other massive logging projects around the world.

I'm glad this one is getting attention, though. May the Finnish people show us how we can get it right.

> and the electricity prices are going up due to these data centers

Got source for this? My impression is that base loads decrease power prices. Has something changed?

This is the kind of "paperwork maximal" nonsense that is killing Europe.

Google DID apply for the right permissions, and they even had a consultant on the ground with years of experience who was supposed to navigate these complexities ... and even WITH all that, you get the result of idiots saying "Google BYPASSED OUR LAWS!!!!!"

Sit in the shoes of a Google lawyer trying to navigate all of this nonsense. Why is there not one government entity telling Google, okay, you need to do XYZ to do this. Instead, they got the ok from several Finnish agencies to go ahead. And then, even as a surprise to the exiting Finnish government agencies they were working with, yet ANOTHER agency shows up and says OH YOU DIDNT DO ABCDEFGHIJK steps.

You people are just ridiculous.

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