Comment by akudha
5 hours ago
What is the point? They will pay a fine and move on to their next exploit. Maybe the punishment should be to force them to spend as much money/time/effort as needed to regrow the entire forest, all 250,000 trees, and then some. Even if it takes 20-30 years - pay for reforestation, hire crews, pay for inspections/watchdogs to monitor etc
The real punishment arguably already happened. This could have been a feel-good project with lots of positive PR: a datacenter built far from major population centers, in a place with lots of available water that isn't used for anything else, in a country with relatively cheap electricity that is overwhelmingly produced from nuclear, hydro and wind. Amid all the negative datacenter PR it could have been a project Google could point to where every single objection has been addressed. Instead it has become a PR disaster that has been dragged through the news cycle and social media's outrage cycle.
If Finland prohibits them from continuing construction, they don’t get the data center they want, and they have to start over somewhere else.
Yes, Finland can also tighten the rules on future permits etc. But after all this, Google will simply pay a fine and look for another country/forest to exploit. It will also not bring back the 250K trees they destroyed.
Even if Google abandons the site and refuses to pay a fine, they’ll have lost all the money they have invested in site surveys, contracts, labor… even the delays alone of making them fulfill the EIS cost them money, not to mention whatever opportunity cost they were trying to minimize by flouting the environmental regulations.
Google is already feeling pain from this.
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The trees were being "destroyed" (harvested) anyway, that is why they were planted. I don't understand why certain types of people are struggling so hard with the facts of this case.
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See the previous comments for why it's a mostly fake story designed to make low-information people angry.
This. This would be real pain for them in terms of latency to launch.