The New York post should basically never be used as a source and this article is a great example of why. It is just obviously not journalism as most people would recognize the concept. Everything they post is ragebait, clickbait or both. They are institutionally allergic to any form of nuance.
I was completly with you till the last moment when you posted... Exactly another of the same type of article.
Can we have a news feed the is parsed and checked again other sources to deliver the highest proportion of base factually unambiguous data, with maybe a tier 2/3 probable analysis/opinions as optional overlays?
Seems doable
I can’t help the fact that the original article has a perspective on the matter. But I do know I would always prefer original reporting than what is basically a badly written blogspam rewrite.
Ground news was started by the right wing to shift the Overton window rightward. It's funded by Joe Ricketts, a conspicuous conservative super-PAC donor and gets its bias scores from AllSides, which grew out of Republican organizations.
Hmmm... normally I would dismiss this type of comment. But such a service really shouldn't have to be funded by anyone, let alone political donors to any party.
Ideal service should be local small model run as a self hosted federated instance, piped data to your terminal of choice. The opinion layer could be pulled from federated comments, the analysis layer from sources based on some sort of trust rating. Variance from unambiguous data for instance. RSS friendly maybe?
If I have nothing better to do later I will try to start writing it maybe.
Can you provide citations for all you claim? Ground News was founded in 2017 by Canadian siblings Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh, through the University of Waterloo's startup ecosystem. I cannot find any evidence of what you say about its origin story, and to be honest I think you made it up (or are passing along claims that someone else made up)
Receiving investments from people affiliated with the GOP doesn’t seem itself that bad, unless you are so partisan that you yourself are infected with exactly the thing the site aims to combat. Left wing bias is also toxic in certain media sources and should be avoided unless you don’t actually care about bias and are more interested in an agenda.
> I was completly with you till the last moment when you posted... Exactly another of the same type of article.
Heh yeah. Sounded to me like “I agree with everything but realized this is a right wing article and just can’t.. so here’s a left wing rage bait instead”
I said nothing about politics, you are reading your own stuff into it. I linked to the original reporting that every other article is a rewrite of. Sorry that you find it biased.
> the cool climate makes it especially attractive for saving on energy costs.
How cool climate helps saving energy ? My naive understanding is it helps with cooling which is mostly done by evaporating water. Does they also cool DS by compressing and expanding fluids?
If it takes chinese propaganda to convince the us and eu to give a shit about the impending climate collapse and local environmental damage caused by data centers, we’re the idiots.
You are indeed idiots, if you think that climate collapse is a bigger and more acute threat to EU than the coming economic collapse caused by lack of growth and innovation compared to US and China. More environmental regulations will not help Europe rebuild the industrial base it needs to defend itself against Russia+China without the US.
Ranking an existential threat to our species higher than an economic recession is how Europe ended up where it is today. Climate change will not be solved by austerity anyway (quite the opposite). The only thing austerity would accomplish is fade Europe into global irrelevance.
Ranking existential threat higher than economic recession is orthogonal to austerity. If your problem is austerity, complain about that - not climate action. Or, well, inaction.
The article seems to just say, google cleared trees without a permit, it says where they did this and when.
At most maybe the headline implies they did it evily, where it sounds more likely it was beuticratic screw up. But on the whole the article seems to stick to the facts.
Calling out the Post and linking to the Guardian is borderline a comedic bit. "That right wing tabloid is totally deranged, instead read something like my left wing tabloid."
I make no comment on the political bias of the outlets. My comment was all about who actually reported these facts and who regurgitated a terrible summary.
In what way is the Guardian’s article any less ragebait? They’re both presenting an utter non-story as some environmental catastrophe for “datacenter bad” ragebait
The guardian article, though obviously having its own thesis and perspective, presents far more context and detail so that readers can be informed and make up their own mind about the facts of the issue. The NYPost strips out all the detail and uncritically presents the worst possible spin as the ground truth.
I think your “datacenter bad” and “non story” comments indicate that you are biased in the opposite direction that you’re complaining about. You seem not to be interested in actually learning whether any serious misconduct occurred, which is genuinely up for debate.
This issue genuinely matters to a lot of people. Tribalism doesn’t help on either side.
>After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.
Yup, definitely no partisan spin in the guardian article...c'mon
Just because it only means one thing in your bubble, doesn't mean that it only has that meaning. Dog whistle is in fact a general term.
Bubbles are bad, always be on guard about accidentally ending up in one. Because it does happen accidentally. A hallmark of it is only being aware of your bubbles word usage...
We're all in the bubble of our own personal experience though, and there's no escaping that. Even if you go travelling (which you absolutely should!) you're still only going to meet there people that you meet.
That's not too say you shouldn't try and recognize the bubbles that you're in, just that there's no escaping them, so it's hard to judge people and their bubbles when you're just as much in one as they are.
Even orgs like AP or Reuters cannot always be trusted. They do a more reasonable job in most cases, but this just makes it easier for when they do inevitably deploy influence operations bc they can hide behind their credibility.
It's incredible how this story has incessantly made the rounds while the actual story is so incredibly small and insignificant. Like it probably wouldn't even make the town newspaper level insignificant.
"A Finnish contractor working for Google failed to get the correct permits for clearing 1.5sq-mi of man made forest that was rezoned to industrial"
The actual takeaway is how desperate the media is for clicks. They don't report based on importance, the report based on attention potential (while people naturally assume it's based on importance, as that's the aire the media projects ofc)
This. Today is this, tomorrow is people doing car turns where it's not allowed, the day after tomorrow there's chaos like in Mexico (my country) because nobody gives a fuck about crap.
I have huge respect for cultures/countries where the rule of law is observed by its citizens just because it is the right thing to do. If other societies were more like that, every thing would be better.
[I visited Finland, Sweden and Denmark some months ago.]
It's not the missing assessment itself that makes people frown, it's mainly the skipped bureaucracy by the company, and secondarily the poor enforcement of said bureaucracy by the local administration.
A small minority might be concerned about the trees in the area, but it's not a big topic. Main topics are, again, the bureaucracy and the center's electricity consumption with its effect on consumer electricity bills.
> It was about making an environmental assessment before starting on the clearing.
Proof? Because it was already rezoned to industrial from what OP said. Why would it be rezoned if the municipality didn't intend for the trees to be cut and a DC built there?
Yes, obviously people are only angry about things they know about. This says absolutely nothing about the news articles, as the same thing thing can be said about any event, no matter how justified the anger would be.
An article making people angry doesn't automatically make the article rage- or clickbait.
Yes, generally that's how you make public aware of illegal activity.
Not having news about companies braking laws mean generally that the country is likely quite corrupt.
So I don't know where you are from but in Finland anyone breaking a law is expected to be treated equally.
If an individual had ignored the process to this extent they would be in quite hot water.
A large multinational company avoiding the official process feels unjust and is exactly the thing public has been extremely worried of happening regarding the environmental impact.
So it's not because news inflamed something.
It's because something like this is exactly what the public has been alarmed about for a long time.
They definitely intended to cut down the trees. The municipalities far away from cities are poor. And Google is giving payoffs to/threatening local politicians/bureaucrats to get these permits quickly. They promise to fund whatever projects/schools/roads which is pennies to them. While skipping the law set by the central government.
Around here we think that those who pay money to avoid the law have a spot behind the Sauna. I’m quite sure after the next election, because of these shenanigans, we start taxing these DCs to oblivion.
Basically the law says you need to do the assessment if you're removing the trees permanently from over 200 hectares. The company asked for an exemption, the relevant bureau said nope, they cut anyway.
The issue isn't the fact that the law was broken, it was, the issue is that it's been international recurring headlines for 2 weeks despite being a non-story if it happened 5 years ago.
The main issue is that can a large company avoid process in a way that would land an individual in trouble.
It's not about trees.
It's about fairness.
It's also about the fact these processes are in place to stop large companies causing environmental damage.
It can be argued "a few trees isn't much" but it's about the entire protective mechanism to stop, say mining companies, to wantonly ravage the landscape.
If one company can do it, it means the system isn't implementing the protection the voters would like to have for nature.
It is a nothingburger from the fairness point as well. People knowingly and unknowingly violate a lot of permitting processes all the time and in many cases never suffer any consequences even if discovered, unless they have zealous neighbors.
It was commercial timberland before this. It was going to be harvested anyway, which may not be as heavy impact as fully clearing it, but it is not natural forest.
Notably, these kind of hit pieces are almost always about extracting some concession from the targeted organization (Google, in this case).
The assessment also concerns assessing for example runoff into rivers and neighbouring areas which include natural peatland. The culture in Finland respects the rule of law and people are often quite informed and detail oriented about matters of land management. The process exists for a reason and if people try to shortcut it the land should be forfitted although clearly there is so much money involved that it won't be. If they don't send a string message now, it errodes people's trust in the law and society which as said is very important in Finland. It keeps things working well.
Yes, my point, the media fosters misinformation and deceit to foster rage all in the name of getting people to view ads.
The logging forest was getting cleared not matter what, and it's microscopic compared to total forested land. So the actual story is a permitting fumble.
And entire country getting outraged over a permitting fumble (a parking ticket level occurnace) is something only institution that lives and dies by hijacking eyeballs could orchestrate.
How many times do we get to take “microscopic compared to total forested land” away?
Boy I sure hope it’s infinity times!
Anyway it seems like you’re incorrect. They actually didn’t have the approval necessary, and no, a zoning approval does not grant all other required forms of approval (obviously).
I don't think people realize that there was no option of do we not log the forest, but imho the issue is any forest being cut down for data centers is a waste of sand and effort, make them in deserts or dry land. In the middle of oceans works as well, we are getting data centers in all sorts of weird and imho wrong places.
I find this issue small but the choice of these companies to pick the convenient location for them to build a data center concerning, and govts shouldn't be bending over. If these things can be built in space we can build them in places where no one lives and no living being is harmed or logged.. cough.
On the contrary, north is exactly the right place to build them. There's plenty of space with low ecological value, more electricity generation (wind), cooling needs are reduced, and the heat can be used (and is used) for district heating.
Now one can argue whether we should build that many data centers or not. But when one is built, the north is a good choice.
Until it is not; some companies are actually putting environnemental & employees health issues with sincerity in their contracts. With shared responsibilities.
Trees grow like weeds and in the grand scheme of things it's really not that much land.
The bigger thing I worry about isn't the felled trees, but rather the power consumption of the data center. And for that, I think it's generally good that google is placing a datacenter in a cold climate country.
Not sure if I should respond to the attitude or the facts here...
I'm guessing you're out of the blast radius so it's easy to form an image and shadow box against it...with the hope others will buy into the diversion...
Btw I'm not even against all data centers. I am for following the law.
Trees take a generation or two to regrow. They don't "grow like weeds." Someone has to plant and protect them while they grow. That's a lot of work.
In the meantime, there are displaced wolves roaming the neighborhoods.
Plus, these trees aren't going to be replanted like in your projection. They're getting replaced with steel, concrete, asphalt, and electronics. All of which supporting tech that consumes rather than generates resources.
And the trees are^Wwere part of a system. They kept muddy water from flowing into the other stream. This will have all kinds of "downstrean" (heh) effects.
Forests can be cleared like this, but it requires assessment, approval and preparation. This wrecklessness is the epitome of "move fast and break things," "ask forgiveness rather than permission," and the "never believe you're wrong" mindsets that have caused so much damage.
As if people didnt have enough reasons to mistrust the U.S.
I hope this disastwe hastens Europe toward de-googlification.
10 to 20 years. Obviously it depends on the species.
> They don't "grow like weeds." Someone has to plant and protect them while they grow. That's a lot of work.
Planting takes some work, for sure, but otherwise it's literally just leaving them alone. That's how sustainable logging works. But even if you don't specifically plant them trees naturally sprout and reforest. For example, when yellowstone burnt down about 40 years ago now, nobody went in to plant new trees there, they naturally grew back and it's now to the point where only a few traces of that fire remain (in the form of a few burnt stumps that you can still see).
Any farmer will tell you that it takes effort to stop trees from growing where you don't want them.
> In the meantime, there are displaced wolves roaming the neighborhoods.
It's 1 sq mile of land in a nation with 80,000 sq miles of forest. The wolves will find other places to roam.
> Plus, these trees aren't going to be replanted like in your projection. They're getting replaced with steel, concrete, asphalt, and electronics. All of which supporting tech that consumes rather than generates resources.
Fair point. I was mostly pushing back on the notion that this is some sort of irrecoverable horrible environmental problem because of the lost trees.
> Forests can be cleared like this, but it requires assessment, approval and preparation. This wrecklessness is the epitome of "move fast and break things," "ask forgiveness rather than permission," and the "never believe you're wrong" mindsets that have caused so much damage.
I'm not defending google for breaking the law and I agree they should have followed the rules. I'm mostly just pointing out that the amount of trees being felled along with the size of land being taken is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. It's a large building, for sure, but an ultimately small amount of land.
Actually you might wanna spend some time looking to this a little further it turns out these are not ordinary forests these are called boreal forests these sometimes take 100 years to recover in due to the short growing season and sometimes they don't actually recover.
And beyond that even when they do recover that's when they have good topsoil. In this situation Google removed the topsoil as well.
Speaking of the topsoil there's other add-on effects such as exposing methylmercury under the topsoil which gets washed away when it now rains. That mercury as well as other sediment makes its way into the water system and it actually clogs fish's gills and poisons the water system.
On top of that I discovered that it's actually 2 square miles not just one. But the fact that it's only a percent of a percent of Finland's total forest isn't really a useful comparison: Imagine if Google bulldozed 3,400 American homes without permission would we say oh there's still plenty of homes left?
Logging is one of the most efficient forms of carbon capture that we currently have. Felling trees is exactly how we keep climates cooler. Without felling, forests do a pretty poor job at carbon capture, trees that die rot and release almost all of their captured CO2 back into the atmosphere as they decompose (all of it if there's a forest fire). The more we can make and build out of wood, the better.
And, as I pointed out, I am concerned about the power consumption of data centers. But, all things considered, if we are going to have them then the best place to put them to reduce their power consumption is cold climates.
> Obviously you’re making this argument in bad faith
Obviously you have an uncharitable view of my comment.
It's not "bad faith" just because it's a view you don't share.
> Cutting down trees and replacing them with an industrial park is not a form of carbon capture.
Depends entirely on what's done with the wood that was cut down. For sure, if it's all sold as firewood then no it's ultimately not beneficial. However, if any of it is turned into a long term wood product then yeah, carbon capture has occurred. If it's burnt, it's ultimately a carbon neutral action as the captured carbon from the forest is short term regardless.
The bigger problem is emissions from power consumption at the datacenter. That alone dwarfs everything about the deforestation (a point I initially brought up). I'd say that's the point you and others are missing the forest for the trees. Hyperfocusing on the trees is unproductive and an argument of emotion.
> The vast majority of logged biomass does not get turned into long-term wood products.
Some of it does, which is what makes it carbon capture. You don't have to perfectly capture all carbon from biomass to have achieved carbon capture. This is why unmanaged forests are carbon negative, although inefficient. Even though most carbon is sent back into the atmosphere due to rot, some does end up absorbed in the ground.
The majority of endangered animals in Finland are water dwelling. The ones that aren't are predators who wander regardless. They are endangered because of their interactions with farmers and livestock.
1 sq mile of forest lost in a nation that has over 80,000 square miles of forest is insignificant.
If you think about it, it's a tiny portion of territory that had been already sold to Google, presumably with full knowledge of what they were going to do with it. There are comparatively huge areas in Finland that have been cleared from the forest to make space for human activities of all kinds.
Caring about something also means you don't want the issue to be misrepresented.
This is the most effective altruist anti AI headline you could get out of this story.
250k trees seems like a lot from you looking out your window. From the perspective of trees we cut down every year (that we account for) it is close to a rounding error. This is a place where they take forest management seriously - and thats the only reason any one even noticed or had to get a permit.
>250k trees seems like a lot from you looking out your window. From the perspective of trees we cut down every year (that we account for) it is close to a rounding error.
Because there's a bigger bad the smaller bad is totally fine and nobody should care?
And it seems it was 400k in total :
"In addition to the 250,000 trees felled at Muhos, Annala estimates that an additional 150,000 trees were felled at Otanmäki"
I don't care how sick our society is to normalize cutting 400k trees for data centers. It's wrong.
300 hectares is about 0.05% of the area logged in Finland (500,000 to 700,000 hectares) every year. 89% of Finland is covered by trees. The land that was logged by Google was a plantation forest planted by humans. Google also owns the land and it’s likely known they plan on building a data center.
I would hesitate to call it a panic. That’s shifting the narrative from ”megacorporation is doing evil” towards ”people are just panicking over nothing”.
Which is, of course, something a damage control agent would try to push.
I understand that, I responded to a comment talking about the ‘environmental damage’ and was putting it in perspective. Again, it’s five hundredths of one percent of the land logged each year in Finland. It’s less than a rounding error.
What are the odds the permit that Google or their contractor failed to pull would’ve been granted? I’d put the odds at 99% given that Google purchased the land. It was inevitable.
You misread OP : he’s stating the impact is insignifiant and that media focus on attention ROI.
Someone caring for environnement might think: the finlandforestgate focus public attention while there’s way more important and actionable environmental issues to solve.
The story here is that companies act with impunity. Anyone who fails to get a permit to do a thing should not do the thing, if they are rich enough, they can do the thing anyway and face no significant consequence. Hence people get mad, and understandably so.
Google - and all the many companies like them - only have themselves to blame for why they lost the benefit of the doubt. Play shitty games, win shitty prizes.
This has been a major story in Finland. The head of Google's Finnish operations was hiding from the biggest newspaper in Finland (Helsingin Sanomat) for days. This is also not on a "Finnish contractor", since the fuck up was on Tuike Finland, which is Google's data center subsidiary in Finland.
Here's the list of articles that Helsingin Sanomat has written about Google's data center shenanigans:
> That sounds ridiculous though, no? Look at how much forest the country has.
The British isles where once covered in forest, too. Then they decided to build a big fleet. Then came the industrial revolution. Now they're down to some 13% of forest...
Yes, Finland might be one of most forested countries in the world (by percentage of land area) now, but history shows that can change quickly if one is not careful about it. Death of a country's forest by a thousand cuts, if you will :)
To an outsider this might sound like an overreaction, but it has to be taken seriously - keep in mind that Finland is one of Europe's premiere locations for grand scale datacentre buildout. Cool climate, lots of available land, politically stable, easy access to cheap and clean power; many very good reasons to assume that this will not be the last datacentre being built there. So yeah, stories like this concern people.
It seems out of proportion that it's national news when a foreign megacorporation illegally logs woods in order to build a data centre?
They (Tuike Finland, the Google subsidiary, not a contractor) even asked the authorities if they could skip doing the assessment, were not exempted, and they still continued to log.
Again, this is small beans local town scale bureaucratic fumbling. Did the town think that Google was getting into forestry when they approved the sale?
Google (or really it's contractor) failed to get the permit, a permit which would have been approved anyway.
Again, do you work for Google? Because that's the only reason I can think of why you're so boldly saying these things that are just not true. Especially the part where you constantly try to pin this on a contractor.
This is not about a permit. It's about doing an environmental impact assessment. Google's Finnish subsidiary started logging the forest in March. Then right at the end of April, Tuike Finland (Google) asked the national regulators if they could get a case-by-case decision on the need for the environmental impact assessment, wanting to not have to do it for their permits. Then they got an answer on May 22nd, clearly saying that the environmental impact assessment is required. And Google continued logging until August.
This is Google themselves not following the law, asking for exemptions, not getting one, and then continuing to not follow the law.
Happens constantly? On what authority do you speak of this? Especially when you had none of the facts of this case right either.
But yeah, sure. Show me how often the YVA is being ignored in Finnish industrial construction. Better yet if you have examples of companies asking the regulators for a case-by-case exemption, failing to get it, and continuing to log.
So you have no proof, you have no expertise and you have no credibility because you've already posted tons of misinformation. Yeah, I'm filing this under B for "bullshit".
It is absolutely ridiculous that a permitting mishap over a miniscule piece of land is a major story. It speaks more to the media and political environment than anything else
In my world, ignoring the law isn't "a permitting mishap". Or do you also call speeding "an accelerator mishap"?
Google didn't do the environmental impact assessment the law required. Google asked the regulators if they could get a case-by-case decision to not do it. Regulators shot down Google's idea, emphasising how a clearance as large as the one they planned would specifically require it. And Google continued to log for months after this.
They're still like nine weeks away from submitting their environmental impact assessment by their own statements. For a logging project they started in March.
You can't even put this on ignorance when they engage in correspondence with the regulators and get told specifically about it. And as Helsingin Sanomat put it: they could have found this information easily on Google.
Maybe this is just a cultural thing because yes, speed limits are irrelevant in the US. I do not expect people to follow all the laws all the time. Do you not have jaywalking laws?
First time hearing of number of trees as a measue in forestry. In scandinavia we use hectars (100x100m). There’s also several different m3 measurements (with and without bark), that is used along with timber quality.
Finland has trees in billions. Still google should follow the laws and hand in the right permits.
Supposedly they don't actually monitor @ pings. If you need to contact the admins, I typically get much quicker responses by emailing hn@ycombinator.com
A lot of the regulatory footguns European legislators have implemented over the past ~35 years were ideologically driven by progressive US/UK academia and media.
Unfortunately the distance between stupid, self-defeating Anglo-American activism and European legislation is shorter than the distance between that activism and American legislation.
Generally, Europeans would benefit from being as critical of progressive Anglo-American activists, academics, and media as we are of American corporate interests.
Weird how many people on HN think this is about the count. Also it caused animal displacement from what I could gather, Google of course did this willingly and knowingly, because they know nothing will happen.
This here is the exact sentiment which is making the entire country quite angry.
These are not pointless bureaucratic hoops.
The entire voting population is quite worried of large multinational companies starting extractive projects that damage the environment, like mines.
These are the same processes that are put into place to stop say mining companies wantonly ravaging the landscape.
It's a canary of a large company attempting to avoid the process, which was put in place to protect the environment.
So everyone is now quite concerned that are the environmental protections really functional or not.
Basically everyone considers nature to be a public good in Finland. There is "every mans right" which allows you to camp and collect berries almost everywhere, for instance. Majority of the population has vacation homes in the forests next to lakes. A large mine that ignores environmental effects can thus damage both the public goods and the value of private properties quite a lot. I mean - that is the feeling the people have.
So it's not about "company doing something in their own property, big deal". It's about respecting safety mechanism to protect public goods.
And, that the government should keep everyone equal under the law.
No one is thinking only about few trees. Everyone is quite angry that a company could not follow due process without any backlash and worried what happens with, say the next large mine if the systems intended to protect the nature are not really working.
It’s the same bureaucratic hoops that allow for clean drinking water and fresh air.
This wasn’t even something that was up in the air, it was well known the datacenter wouldn’t be built around the trees, the permits and everything else were formalities. To just blatantly ignore that is causing upset.
And Google were well aware of all such requirements before they even started the process of acquiring the area.
US-controlled data centres that will subject EU data to US laws and spying and whose profits will somehow evade their fair share of taxation in the EU.
So, no thank you, these are not the data centres we need.
This. AI development is absolutely vital for EU national security. With Russian threat in the east, it is high time that Europe stopped putting excessive environmentalism in front of the needed industrial developments.
This building will stick out as a sore thumb, a blind drone operator would hit it in their sleep. It literally does nothing for EU national security, as we’ve seen with how easily Ukraine destroyed Russian datacenters.
Oh and it turns off in a second given orders from the US government.
In case of a large war, data centers (even foreign ones) can be commandeered by the government to train military AI for autonomous drones or combat robots ASAP. This is clearly where the future of warfare is heading.
Protecting it could indeed be an issue, but destruction is not guaranteed. Finland has advanced air defense.
With 8 billion of them, people are going to have different attitudes than you towards the sanctity of life then you, so while I'm not advocating for killing random people for the fun of it, I'll say that life is cheap when you're in the middle of a war.
The question is, if there was a button that gave you ten million dollars but someone, somewhere, would die, would you press it? It's an abuse of the trolley problem but ask all your friends next time there's a lull in dinner conversation.
Still, I hope that we're r
planting trees elsewhere to make up for the lost of trees in this instance.
2. Google starts construction, fails to file paperwork at some level.
3. 1,000's of trees decompose naturally somewhere.
4. Local community upset that Google is building what Government welcomed while allowing tree decomposition to reign unchecked. The horror, the horror.
5. Sea levels rise, 86.5% of humanity is wiped out, and a great famine ensues.
6. Meanwhile, in the State of California, taxpayer funding is squandered on supertrains to nowhere that noone wants, instead of clearing fuel from forests, while the electric company shuts off the electricity, to prevent forest fires.
As much as I dislike big evil corporations, I'm gonna give google a pass on forgetting to hand in their homework this time.
Compared to the State of California, they seem to be doing a good job.
disclaimer: this summary contains at least one forward looking statement :|
Pretty clickbait. No fan of Google, but it sounds like they just jumped the gun slightly on the clearing and it would have been/will be perfectly fine once the permit comes in, which I'm sure it will unless their planning process is totally broken. If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees to build the thing you sold them the land to do.
Finland has something like 20 billion trees and plant tens of millions a year for forestry. The bloody country is nothing but trees. 250k isn't nothing but it's hardly the end of the world.
> If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees
When you own a piece of land containing a forest area there are typically (in most of europe at least) certain rules and regulation as to what you can do and what sort of permissions you need. Eg you may be required to keep some patches of the forest vs just cutting down everything, there can be places you cannot clear the forest completely etc.
Even if google could eventually anyway build some datacenters in that area, it does not mean that they were allowed to do what they did.
But otherwise I agree that this transaction should never have happened in the first place.
But if the very first thing you do on the construction site is disregarding the local laws and regulations, when they were explicitly told about environment assessment requirement, it's not exactly favorable first impression, is it?
Value of a mature tree is normally several thousand euros here (I don't know about Finland).
Multipled by 250K. Times 3 -- a decent factor for illegal acts.
Would be a appropriate compensation for Finland.
Extrapolating to Finland’s entire forested area, Finland is sitting on hundreds of trillions of wealth!
Or maybe this is a bad measure?
You also forgot that Google owned the trees that they cut down, so they would be compensating themselves.
The debate is about the order in which a contractor pulled permits. It’s silly how much people are obsessing over some trees being cut down. This happens with all development.
That's a perfectly normal and environmentally conscious thing to do before laying down concrete foundations. Topsoil is recycled and sold to farms. To leave it in place would pointlessly waste an ecological resource.
The environmentally conscious thing to do the necessary environmental impact assessments before clear-cutting the land.
According to the Guardian article, which it the source the NY Post used, if those trees were illegally logged, they cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.
Do you know if the law also prohibits the topsoil from being sold to farms?
This wasn't some ancient oak forest, but rather a pine tree plantation that would be cut for timber in a timely rotation of cutting and planting anyway. If you want to build anything in Finland, you first cut the trees. Because trees grow everywhere, and if you leave a place unattended for a little while, it gets reclaimed by the forest.
So no, cutting the trees isn't the topic. The topic is the skipped bureaucracy. Outcome would be the same, but of course you need to follow the steps first.
The corruption from politicians and the greed of big companies are literally destroying the world. How is it possible that something like this could happen? 250k trees cutted down on Muhos and other 150k on Otanmäki just to build data centers? This is madness, absolute madness.
I don't get it, what did they expect when they sold a 3x2km area to Google to build a data center?
The space around the town is entirely cultivated land for tens of kms across, hundreds of times the land that they sold to Google- and that land too once had been forest and was felled by the Finns to make space for agriculture. Is anyone outraged about this?
Difference is that most people/companies try to follow laws while doing that.
Also the entity selling the land is ofc not the same as the entity enforcing the law. I assume that everyone was kind of expecting that they would follow the laws.
The weird part is that they would’ve gotten the right permit in a few weeks. Now they are just sending a message that they are above the law. Even if you are allowed to do something, it doesn’t mean there isn’t limitations how you can do it.
a true punnishment for google would be bieng forced to perform a total ecosystem restoration, every bug, worm, critter, plant, and micro organism, cm by cm, trees ,mosses, the whole thing, purchased from indivuals one tiny bit at a time in a way thatcaused zero further damage.
minimum cost will be 500 billion dollars and would serve notice on the real value of ecosystems, ie: replacement value
related:
183 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048638
253 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50196837
The New York post should basically never be used as a source and this article is a great example of why. It is just obviously not journalism as most people would recognize the concept. Everything they post is ragebait, clickbait or both. They are institutionally allergic to any form of nuance.
Here is the (much, much higher quality) original reporting that this terrible ny post writeup is based on: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...
I was completly with you till the last moment when you posted... Exactly another of the same type of article.
Can we have a news feed the is parsed and checked again other sources to deliver the highest proportion of base factually unambiguous data, with maybe a tier 2/3 probable analysis/opinions as optional overlays? Seems doable
https://news.kagi.com/google/2026102416/finland-suspends-goo...
You may enjoy Kagi’s News offering. Linked is the same topic.
Kagi is not an original source.
One was not requested.
I can’t help the fact that the original article has a perspective on the matter. But I do know I would always prefer original reporting than what is basically a badly written blogspam rewrite.
Ground News provides aggregated sources with factuality scores, although the scores are subscriber-only. I've been thinking about subscribing.
Here's their page for this story: https://ground.news/article/google-knocks-down-250-thousand-...
It also links to related coverage, such as the project being cancelled in response to the outrage.
Ground news was started by the right wing to shift the Overton window rightward. It's funded by Joe Ricketts, a conspicuous conservative super-PAC donor and gets its bias scores from AllSides, which grew out of Republican organizations.
Hmmm... normally I would dismiss this type of comment. But such a service really shouldn't have to be funded by anyone, let alone political donors to any party.
Ideal service should be local small model run as a self hosted federated instance, piped data to your terminal of choice. The opinion layer could be pulled from federated comments, the analysis layer from sources based on some sort of trust rating. Variance from unambiguous data for instance. RSS friendly maybe?
If I have nothing better to do later I will try to start writing it maybe.
Can you provide citations for all you claim? Ground News was founded in 2017 by Canadian siblings Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh, through the University of Waterloo's startup ecosystem. I cannot find any evidence of what you say about its origin story, and to be honest I think you made it up (or are passing along claims that someone else made up)
Receiving investments from people affiliated with the GOP doesn’t seem itself that bad, unless you are so partisan that you yourself are infected with exactly the thing the site aims to combat. Left wing bias is also toxic in certain media sources and should be avoided unless you don’t actually care about bias and are more interested in an agenda.
You are describing Ground News
Yep, here’s their page for this topic: https://ground.news/article/lvv-made-a-request-to-the-police...
> I was completly with you till the last moment when you posted... Exactly another of the same type of article.
Heh yeah. Sounded to me like “I agree with everything but realized this is a right wing article and just can’t.. so here’s a left wing rage bait instead”
I said nothing about politics, you are reading your own stuff into it. I linked to the original reporting that every other article is a rewrite of. Sorry that you find it biased.
> It is just obviously not journalism as most people would recognize the concept.
Disagree.
Most people would think this is journalism. This is the kind of journalism most people are interacting with in 2026.
> the cool climate makes it especially attractive for saving on energy costs.
How cool climate helps saving energy ? My naive understanding is it helps with cooling which is mostly done by evaporating water. Does they also cool DS by compressing and expanding fluids?
Obviously a colder environment requires less energy for cooling
Also evaporative cooling is not used in most of the world, only in very hot and dry places
Cool climate lets you use the waste heat in district heating systems, getting more bang for your buck.
China is paying for these right?
Or did China spark the fire in western countries to care about this stuff?
If it takes chinese propaganda to convince the us and eu to give a shit about the impending climate collapse and local environmental damage caused by data centers, we’re the idiots.
You are indeed idiots, if you think that climate collapse is a bigger and more acute threat to EU than the coming economic collapse caused by lack of growth and innovation compared to US and China. More environmental regulations will not help Europe rebuild the industrial base it needs to defend itself against Russia+China without the US.
Ranking an existential threat to our species lower than an economic recession is how we’ve ended up where we are today.
Ranking an existential threat to our species higher than an economic recession is how Europe ended up where it is today. Climate change will not be solved by austerity anyway (quite the opposite). The only thing austerity would accomplish is fade Europe into global irrelevance.
Ranking existential threat higher than economic recession is orthogonal to austerity. If your problem is austerity, complain about that - not climate action. Or, well, inaction.
The enemy of my friend is my…. Frenemy?
It does almost seem like it, doesn’t it?
Would you care more about Google's crime here if you did not suppose China wanted you to care about it?
What exactly is click bait here?
The article seems to just say, google cleared trees without a permit, it says where they did this and when.
At most maybe the headline implies they did it evily, where it sounds more likely it was beuticratic screw up. But on the whole the article seems to stick to the facts.
Calling out the Post and linking to the Guardian is borderline a comedic bit. "That right wing tabloid is totally deranged, instead read something like my left wing tabloid."
I make no comment on the political bias of the outlets. My comment was all about who actually reported these facts and who regurgitated a terrible summary.
In what way is the Guardian’s article any less ragebait? They’re both presenting an utter non-story as some environmental catastrophe for “datacenter bad” ragebait
The guardian article, though obviously having its own thesis and perspective, presents far more context and detail so that readers can be informed and make up their own mind about the facts of the issue. The NYPost strips out all the detail and uncritically presents the worst possible spin as the ground truth.
I think your “datacenter bad” and “non story” comments indicate that you are biased in the opposite direction that you’re complaining about. You seem not to be interested in actually learning whether any serious misconduct occurred, which is genuinely up for debate.
This issue genuinely matters to a lot of people. Tribalism doesn’t help on either side.
>After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.
Yup, definitely no partisan spin in the guardian article...c'mon
Those are facts. You may disagree with the presentation, but you can’t refute what happened.
I never said anything about partisan spin?
I'm pointing it out to you.
"Dog whistling" is the formal term for the style of reporting being published.
Dog whistling refers to coded racist language that tries to appear deniable. I don’t see how this qualifies.
Just because it only means one thing in your bubble, doesn't mean that it only has that meaning. Dog whistle is in fact a general term.
Bubbles are bad, always be on guard about accidentally ending up in one. Because it does happen accidentally. A hallmark of it is only being aware of your bubbles word usage...
We're all in the bubble of our own personal experience though, and there's no escaping that. Even if you go travelling (which you absolutely should!) you're still only going to meet there people that you meet.
That's not too say you shouldn't try and recognize the bubbles that you're in, just that there's no escaping them, so it's hard to judge people and their bubbles when you're just as much in one as they are.
The guardian is just lying more politely.
The Guardian is not an example of rage bait and click bait but is an an exemplar of solid journalism?
Why not news sources that eschew emotional manipulation, like Associated Press or Reuters. They aim for information rather than propaganda.
Graun can still be very good at times but i think it's a fair comment at this point that they're best assumed to be wrong about most things.
Even orgs like AP or Reuters cannot always be trusted. They do a more reasonable job in most cases, but this just makes it easier for when they do inevitably deploy influence operations bc they can hide behind their credibility.
It's incredible how this story has incessantly made the rounds while the actual story is so incredibly small and insignificant. Like it probably wouldn't even make the town newspaper level insignificant.
"A Finnish contractor working for Google failed to get the correct permits for clearing 1.5sq-mi of man made forest that was rezoned to industrial"
The actual takeaway is how desperate the media is for clicks. They don't report based on importance, the report based on attention potential (while people naturally assume it's based on importance, as that's the aire the media projects ofc)
No.
It was about making an environmental assesment before starting on the clearing.
Which is mandated by law.
Now the environmental impact cannot be assessed.
This is making the entire country quite angry.
This. Today is this, tomorrow is people doing car turns where it's not allowed, the day after tomorrow there's chaos like in Mexico (my country) because nobody gives a fuck about crap.
I have huge respect for cultures/countries where the rule of law is observed by its citizens just because it is the right thing to do. If other societies were more like that, every thing would be better.
[I visited Finland, Sweden and Denmark some months ago.]
It's not the missing assessment itself that makes people frown, it's mainly the skipped bureaucracy by the company, and secondarily the poor enforcement of said bureaucracy by the local administration.
A small minority might be concerned about the trees in the area, but it's not a big topic. Main topics are, again, the bureaucracy and the center's electricity consumption with its effect on consumer electricity bills.
> This is making the entire country quite angry.
Because of the news articles.
> It was about making an environmental assessment before starting on the clearing.
Proof? Because it was already rezoned to industrial from what OP said. Why would it be rezoned if the municipality didn't intend for the trees to be cut and a DC built there?
> Because of the news articles.
Yes, obviously people are only angry about things they know about. This says absolutely nothing about the news articles, as the same thing thing can be said about any event, no matter how justified the anger would be.
An article making people angry doesn't automatically make the article rage- or clickbait.
"Because of the news articles."
Yes, generally that's how you make public aware of illegal activity.
Not having news about companies braking laws mean generally that the country is likely quite corrupt.
So I don't know where you are from but in Finland anyone breaking a law is expected to be treated equally.
If an individual had ignored the process to this extent they would be in quite hot water.
A large multinational company avoiding the official process feels unjust and is exactly the thing public has been extremely worried of happening regarding the environmental impact.
So it's not because news inflamed something.
It's because something like this is exactly what the public has been alarmed about for a long time.
They definitely intended to cut down the trees. The municipalities far away from cities are poor. And Google is giving payoffs to/threatening local politicians/bureaucrats to get these permits quickly. They promise to fund whatever projects/schools/roads which is pennies to them. While skipping the law set by the central government.
Around here we think that those who pay money to avoid the law have a spot behind the Sauna. I’m quite sure after the next election, because of these shenanigans, we start taxing these DCs to oblivion.
Typically things like zoning and environmental assessments are done by different organizations with different mandates.
https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000012304991.html for starters.
Basically the law says you need to do the assessment if you're removing the trees permanently from over 200 hectares. The company asked for an exemption, the relevant bureau said nope, they cut anyway.
The issue isn't the fact that the law was broken, it was, the issue is that it's been international recurring headlines for 2 weeks despite being a non-story if it happened 5 years ago.
The main issue is that can a large company avoid process in a way that would land an individual in trouble.
It's not about trees.
It's about fairness.
It's also about the fact these processes are in place to stop large companies causing environmental damage.
It can be argued "a few trees isn't much" but it's about the entire protective mechanism to stop, say mining companies, to wantonly ravage the landscape.
If one company can do it, it means the system isn't implementing the protection the voters would like to have for nature.
Hence it's a quite political hot potato.
> It's about fairness.
It is a nothingburger from the fairness point as well. People knowingly and unknowingly violate a lot of permitting processes all the time and in many cases never suffer any consequences even if discovered, unless they have zealous neighbors.
To give you an idea how the situation really is like, for example Finland has municipal compost inspectors that track individual property composting.
While things can fall through cracks your disregard for regulation does not really apply as a fair example to the milieu.
The fact that some rules are strictly enforced does not mean all are.
It was commercial timberland before this. It was going to be harvested anyway, which may not be as heavy impact as fully clearing it, but it is not natural forest.
Notably, these kind of hit pieces are almost always about extracting some concession from the targeted organization (Google, in this case).
The assessment also concerns assessing for example runoff into rivers and neighbouring areas which include natural peatland. The culture in Finland respects the rule of law and people are often quite informed and detail oriented about matters of land management. The process exists for a reason and if people try to shortcut it the land should be forfitted although clearly there is so much money involved that it won't be. If they don't send a string message now, it errodes people's trust in the law and society which as said is very important in Finland. It keeps things working well.
>This is making the entire country quite angry.
Yes, my point, the media fosters misinformation and deceit to foster rage all in the name of getting people to view ads.
The logging forest was getting cleared not matter what, and it's microscopic compared to total forested land. So the actual story is a permitting fumble.
And entire country getting outraged over a permitting fumble (a parking ticket level occurnace) is something only institution that lives and dies by hijacking eyeballs could orchestrate.
> (a parking ticket level occurnace)
Remember Finland is the country where we scale fines based on income, as the famous article says "Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket."
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
Not appropriate for this specific issue, but for "traffic ticket" it's worth remembering.
How many times do we get to take “microscopic compared to total forested land” away?
Boy I sure hope it’s infinity times!
Anyway it seems like you’re incorrect. They actually didn’t have the approval necessary, and no, a zoning approval does not grant all other required forms of approval (obviously).
Yes they broke law.
The issue is that gravity of the crime wouldn't even register 5 years ago in a local paper.
My underlying point is that the media is making people insane, and they are somehow grateful for it.
Because it’s a broader pattern that people are worried about…?
I’m confused about what you’re confused about.
Is a person who gets into 150 car accidents not a legitimately bigger story than a person who gets into one car accident?
I don't think people realize that there was no option of do we not log the forest, but imho the issue is any forest being cut down for data centers is a waste of sand and effort, make them in deserts or dry land. In the middle of oceans works as well, we are getting data centers in all sorts of weird and imho wrong places.
I find this issue small but the choice of these companies to pick the convenient location for them to build a data center concerning, and govts shouldn't be bending over. If these things can be built in space we can build them in places where no one lives and no living being is harmed or logged.. cough.
On the contrary, north is exactly the right place to build them. There's plenty of space with low ecological value, more electricity generation (wind), cooling needs are reduced, and the heat can be used (and is used) for district heating.
Now one can argue whether we should build that many data centers or not. But when one is built, the north is a good choice.
It’s always the contractor!
Until it is not; some companies are actually putting environnemental & employees health issues with sincerity in their contracts. With shared responsibilities.
It's crazy how some people don't actually care about environmental issues of their ideology on HN.
Trees grow like weeds and in the grand scheme of things it's really not that much land.
The bigger thing I worry about isn't the felled trees, but rather the power consumption of the data center. And for that, I think it's generally good that google is placing a datacenter in a cold climate country.
Not sure if I should respond to the attitude or the facts here...
I'm guessing you're out of the blast radius so it's easy to form an image and shadow box against it...with the hope others will buy into the diversion...
Btw I'm not even against all data centers. I am for following the law.
Trees take a generation or two to regrow. They don't "grow like weeds." Someone has to plant and protect them while they grow. That's a lot of work.
In the meantime, there are displaced wolves roaming the neighborhoods.
Plus, these trees aren't going to be replanted like in your projection. They're getting replaced with steel, concrete, asphalt, and electronics. All of which supporting tech that consumes rather than generates resources.
And the trees are^Wwere part of a system. They kept muddy water from flowing into the other stream. This will have all kinds of "downstrean" (heh) effects.
Forests can be cleared like this, but it requires assessment, approval and preparation. This wrecklessness is the epitome of "move fast and break things," "ask forgiveness rather than permission," and the "never believe you're wrong" mindsets that have caused so much damage.
As if people didnt have enough reasons to mistrust the U.S.
I hope this disastwe hastens Europe toward de-googlification.
> Trees take a generation or two to regrow.
10 to 20 years. Obviously it depends on the species.
> They don't "grow like weeds." Someone has to plant and protect them while they grow. That's a lot of work.
Planting takes some work, for sure, but otherwise it's literally just leaving them alone. That's how sustainable logging works. But even if you don't specifically plant them trees naturally sprout and reforest. For example, when yellowstone burnt down about 40 years ago now, nobody went in to plant new trees there, they naturally grew back and it's now to the point where only a few traces of that fire remain (in the form of a few burnt stumps that you can still see).
Any farmer will tell you that it takes effort to stop trees from growing where you don't want them.
> In the meantime, there are displaced wolves roaming the neighborhoods.
It's 1 sq mile of land in a nation with 80,000 sq miles of forest. The wolves will find other places to roam.
> Plus, these trees aren't going to be replanted like in your projection. They're getting replaced with steel, concrete, asphalt, and electronics. All of which supporting tech that consumes rather than generates resources.
Fair point. I was mostly pushing back on the notion that this is some sort of irrecoverable horrible environmental problem because of the lost trees.
> Forests can be cleared like this, but it requires assessment, approval and preparation. This wrecklessness is the epitome of "move fast and break things," "ask forgiveness rather than permission," and the "never believe you're wrong" mindsets that have caused so much damage.
I'm not defending google for breaking the law and I agree they should have followed the rules. I'm mostly just pointing out that the amount of trees being felled along with the size of land being taken is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. It's a large building, for sure, but an ultimately small amount of land.
Actually you might wanna spend some time looking to this a little further it turns out these are not ordinary forests these are called boreal forests these sometimes take 100 years to recover in due to the short growing season and sometimes they don't actually recover.
And beyond that even when they do recover that's when they have good topsoil. In this situation Google removed the topsoil as well.
Speaking of the topsoil there's other add-on effects such as exposing methylmercury under the topsoil which gets washed away when it now rains. That mercury as well as other sediment makes its way into the water system and it actually clogs fish's gills and poisons the water system.
On top of that I discovered that it's actually 2 square miles not just one. But the fact that it's only a percent of a percent of Finland's total forest isn't really a useful comparison: Imagine if Google bulldozed 3,400 American homes without permission would we say oh there's still plenty of homes left?
It’s funny that we’re getting rid of cold climate places by 1) felling trees (small bundles at a time!) and 2) building data centers
Logging is one of the most efficient forms of carbon capture that we currently have. Felling trees is exactly how we keep climates cooler. Without felling, forests do a pretty poor job at carbon capture, trees that die rot and release almost all of their captured CO2 back into the atmosphere as they decompose (all of it if there's a forest fire). The more we can make and build out of wood, the better.
And, as I pointed out, I am concerned about the power consumption of data centers. But, all things considered, if we are going to have them then the best place to put them to reduce their power consumption is cold climates.
Obviously you’re making this argument in bad faith, but just so other readers are clear:
Cutting down trees and replacing them with an industrial park is not a form of carbon capture.
The vast majority of logged biomass does not get turned into long-term wood products.
> Obviously you’re making this argument in bad faith
Obviously you have an uncharitable view of my comment.
It's not "bad faith" just because it's a view you don't share.
> Cutting down trees and replacing them with an industrial park is not a form of carbon capture.
Depends entirely on what's done with the wood that was cut down. For sure, if it's all sold as firewood then no it's ultimately not beneficial. However, if any of it is turned into a long term wood product then yeah, carbon capture has occurred. If it's burnt, it's ultimately a carbon neutral action as the captured carbon from the forest is short term regardless.
The bigger problem is emissions from power consumption at the datacenter. That alone dwarfs everything about the deforestation (a point I initially brought up). I'd say that's the point you and others are missing the forest for the trees. Hyperfocusing on the trees is unproductive and an argument of emotion.
> The vast majority of logged biomass does not get turned into long-term wood products.
Some of it does, which is what makes it carbon capture. You don't have to perfectly capture all carbon from biomass to have achieved carbon capture. This is why unmanaged forests are carbon negative, although inefficient. Even though most carbon is sent back into the atmosphere due to rot, some does end up absorbed in the ground.
The trees are part of an ecosystem. Even though they can be planted elsewhere, who knows how many endangered species this will affect.
0.
The majority of endangered animals in Finland are water dwelling. The ones that aren't are predators who wander regardless. They are endangered because of their interactions with farmers and livestock.
1 sq mile of forest lost in a nation that has over 80,000 square miles of forest is insignificant.
If you think about it, it's a tiny portion of territory that had been already sold to Google, presumably with full knowledge of what they were going to do with it. There are comparatively huge areas in Finland that have been cleared from the forest to make space for human activities of all kinds.
Caring about something also means you don't want the issue to be misrepresented.
This is the most effective altruist anti AI headline you could get out of this story.
250k trees seems like a lot from you looking out your window. From the perspective of trees we cut down every year (that we account for) it is close to a rounding error. This is a place where they take forest management seriously - and thats the only reason any one even noticed or had to get a permit.
>250k trees seems like a lot from you looking out your window. From the perspective of trees we cut down every year (that we account for) it is close to a rounding error.
Because there's a bigger bad the smaller bad is totally fine and nobody should care?
And it seems it was 400k in total :
"In addition to the 250,000 trees felled at Muhos, Annala estimates that an additional 150,000 trees were felled at Otanmäki"
I don't care how sick our society is to normalize cutting 400k trees for data centers. It's wrong.
It's hard to be neutral in ideology when your wage and retirement are tied to "datacenter good". Sadly.
At some point, you need cognitive dissonance to function and we see that pretty plainly on HN since the money in the space became very good.
300 hectares is about 0.05% of the area logged in Finland (500,000 to 700,000 hectares) every year. 89% of Finland is covered by trees. The land that was logged by Google was a plantation forest planted by humans. Google also owns the land and it’s likely known they plan on building a data center.
They still broke the law. The law is kinda strict about logging.
Yes, the notable thing isn't that they broke the law, it's the magnitude of the crime committed compared to the media response from it.
It's wildly decoupled in such a way that only full blown moral panic farming could materialize.
I would hesitate to call it a panic. That’s shifting the narrative from ”megacorporation is doing evil” towards ”people are just panicking over nothing”.
Which is, of course, something a damage control agent would try to push.
I understand that, I responded to a comment talking about the ‘environmental damage’ and was putting it in perspective. Again, it’s five hundredths of one percent of the land logged each year in Finland. It’s less than a rounding error.
What are the odds the permit that Google or their contractor failed to pull would’ve been granted? I’d put the odds at 99% given that Google purchased the land. It was inevitable.
You misread OP : he’s stating the impact is insignifiant and that media focus on attention ROI.
Someone caring for environnement might think: the finlandforestgate focus public attention while there’s way more important and actionable environmental issues to solve.
> Like it probably wouldn't even make the town newspaper level insignificant.
To be fair, it actually did make the town newspaper and the people who live there actually do have something to say about it.
The story here is that companies act with impunity. Anyone who fails to get a permit to do a thing should not do the thing, if they are rich enough, they can do the thing anyway and face no significant consequence. Hence people get mad, and understandably so.
If you want to at least appreciate the irony, the above mentioned state of the media is largely due to Google
Google - and all the many companies like them - only have themselves to blame for why they lost the benefit of the doubt. Play shitty games, win shitty prizes.
> man made forest
In other words, a plantation?
Most forests nowadays
Ah okay, it's a contractor of Google phew, then it doesn't matter, Google is not at fault then.
We all know It's okay to subcontract evil, like having poor paid workers in Asian countries. The big company is never at fault in such cases /s
Do you work for Google or something?
This has been a major story in Finland. The head of Google's Finnish operations was hiding from the biggest newspaper in Finland (Helsingin Sanomat) for days. This is also not on a "Finnish contractor", since the fuck up was on Tuike Finland, which is Google's data center subsidiary in Finland.
Here's the list of articles that Helsingin Sanomat has written about Google's data center shenanigans:
It's possible that there's more and I just failed to find them.That sounds ridiculous though, no? Look at how much forest the country has. Making it a national news story seems out of proportion.
> That sounds ridiculous though, no? Look at how much forest the country has.
The British isles where once covered in forest, too. Then they decided to build a big fleet. Then came the industrial revolution. Now they're down to some 13% of forest...
Yes, Finland might be one of most forested countries in the world (by percentage of land area) now, but history shows that can change quickly if one is not careful about it. Death of a country's forest by a thousand cuts, if you will :)
To an outsider this might sound like an overreaction, but it has to be taken seriously - keep in mind that Finland is one of Europe's premiere locations for grand scale datacentre buildout. Cool climate, lots of available land, politically stable, easy access to cheap and clean power; many very good reasons to assume that this will not be the last datacentre being built there. So yeah, stories like this concern people.
It seems out of proportion that it's national news when a foreign megacorporation illegally logs woods in order to build a data centre?
They (Tuike Finland, the Google subsidiary, not a contractor) even asked the authorities if they could skip doing the assessment, were not exempted, and they still continued to log.
Again, this is small beans local town scale bureaucratic fumbling. Did the town think that Google was getting into forestry when they approved the sale?
Google (or really it's contractor) failed to get the permit, a permit which would have been approved anyway.
Again, do you work for Google? Because that's the only reason I can think of why you're so boldly saying these things that are just not true. Especially the part where you constantly try to pin this on a contractor.
This is not about a permit. It's about doing an environmental impact assessment. Google's Finnish subsidiary started logging the forest in March. Then right at the end of April, Tuike Finland (Google) asked the national regulators if they could get a case-by-case decision on the need for the environmental impact assessment, wanting to not have to do it for their permits. Then they got an answer on May 22nd, clearly saying that the environmental impact assessment is required. And Google continued logging until August.
This is Google themselves not following the law, asking for exemptions, not getting one, and then continuing to not follow the law.
But please, feel free to post your source if you have contradicting evidence. Here's mine: https://www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000012304991.html
Everything you said is true.
The issue is the media response vs the scope of the violation. It's a small misstep that happens constantly in construction.
Happens constantly? On what authority do you speak of this? Especially when you had none of the facts of this case right either.
But yeah, sure. Show me how often the YVA is being ignored in Finnish industrial construction. Better yet if you have examples of companies asking the regulators for a case-by-case exemption, failing to get it, and continuing to log.
I don't have anything I can show you....because it doesn't even make the news, going back to my original point
So you have no proof, you have no expertise and you have no credibility because you've already posted tons of misinformation. Yeah, I'm filing this under B for "bullshit".
It is absolutely ridiculous that a permitting mishap over a miniscule piece of land is a major story. It speaks more to the media and political environment than anything else
In my world, ignoring the law isn't "a permitting mishap". Or do you also call speeding "an accelerator mishap"?
Google didn't do the environmental impact assessment the law required. Google asked the regulators if they could get a case-by-case decision to not do it. Regulators shot down Google's idea, emphasising how a clearance as large as the one they planned would specifically require it. And Google continued to log for months after this.
They're still like nine weeks away from submitting their environmental impact assessment by their own statements. For a logging project they started in March.
You can't even put this on ignorance when they engage in correspondence with the regulators and get told specifically about it. And as Helsingin Sanomat put it: they could have found this information easily on Google.
Maybe this is just a cultural thing because yes, speed limits are irrelevant in the US. I do not expect people to follow all the laws all the time. Do you not have jaywalking laws?
First time hearing of number of trees as a measue in forestry. In scandinavia we use hectars (100x100m). There’s also several different m3 measurements (with and without bark), that is used along with timber quality.
Finland has trees in billions. Still google should follow the laws and hand in the right permits.
You must not do much forestry then. Tree density per hectare is a very common metric.
How is “250 k trees” a measure of tree density?
Tree planters will always talk about how many trees they plant.
Which is a completely different context than harvesting.
@dang, could we replace the link with this much better article?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...
This story has already been here multiple times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048638
Supposedly they don't actually monitor @ pings. If you need to contact the admins, I typically get much quicker responses by emailing hn@ycombinator.com
A lot of the regulatory footguns European legislators have implemented over the past ~35 years were ideologically driven by progressive US/UK academia and media.
Unfortunately the distance between stupid, self-defeating Anglo-American activism and European legislation is shorter than the distance between that activism and American legislation.
Generally, Europeans would benefit from being as critical of progressive Anglo-American activists, academics, and media as we are of American corporate interests.
Good. Finland has dozens of billions of trees. Having AI data centers on European soil is more important.
Having the companies building the data centers respect laws is more important.
This isn’t about trees. This is about not following the environmental regulation.
To put in contrast this is something for which a private citizen could get into a lot of hot water.
So it’s about can a large corporation act as they like or do they need to follow the laws just like everyone else.
If they had followed the law, the trees would not be an issue.
Sure, because nobody has ever made an issue about data centers even when they follow the law.
Weird how many people on HN think this is about the count. Also it caused animal displacement from what I could gather, Google of course did this willingly and knowingly, because they know nothing will happen.
Ok so if the count had been 0 you still would be against it because you must jump through pointless bureaucratic hoops?
"jump through pointless bureaucratic hoops?"
This here is the exact sentiment which is making the entire country quite angry.
These are not pointless bureaucratic hoops.
The entire voting population is quite worried of large multinational companies starting extractive projects that damage the environment, like mines.
These are the same processes that are put into place to stop say mining companies wantonly ravaging the landscape.
It's a canary of a large company attempting to avoid the process, which was put in place to protect the environment.
So everyone is now quite concerned that are the environmental protections really functional or not.
Basically everyone considers nature to be a public good in Finland. There is "every mans right" which allows you to camp and collect berries almost everywhere, for instance. Majority of the population has vacation homes in the forests next to lakes. A large mine that ignores environmental effects can thus damage both the public goods and the value of private properties quite a lot. I mean - that is the feeling the people have.
So it's not about "company doing something in their own property, big deal". It's about respecting safety mechanism to protect public goods.
And, that the government should keep everyone equal under the law.
No one is thinking only about few trees. Everyone is quite angry that a company could not follow due process without any backlash and worried what happens with, say the next large mine if the systems intended to protect the nature are not really working.
It’s the same bureaucratic hoops that allow for clean drinking water and fresh air. This wasn’t even something that was up in the air, it was well known the datacenter wouldn’t be built around the trees, the permits and everything else were formalities. To just blatantly ignore that is causing upset. And Google were well aware of all such requirements before they even started the process of acquiring the area.
Your opinion makes others hate data centers. Trees are a symbol of nature and data centers are a symbol of human replacement.
Us data center stans need to accept the public's worries and make a more collaborative argument.
US-controlled data centres that will subject EU data to US laws and spying and whose profits will somehow evade their fair share of taxation in the EU.
So, no thank you, these are not the data centres we need.
This. AI development is absolutely vital for EU national security. With Russian threat in the east, it is high time that Europe stopped putting excessive environmentalism in front of the needed industrial developments.
This building will stick out as a sore thumb, a blind drone operator would hit it in their sleep. It literally does nothing for EU national security, as we’ve seen with how easily Ukraine destroyed Russian datacenters. Oh and it turns off in a second given orders from the US government.
In case of a large war, data centers (even foreign ones) can be commandeered by the government to train military AI for autonomous drones or combat robots ASAP. This is clearly where the future of warfare is heading.
Protecting it could indeed be an issue, but destruction is not guaranteed. Finland has advanced air defense.
The earth has billions of humans, does that make it okay to kill a few?
With 8 billion of them, people are going to have different attitudes than you towards the sanctity of life then you, so while I'm not advocating for killing random people for the fun of it, I'll say that life is cheap when you're in the middle of a war.
The question is, if there was a button that gave you ten million dollars but someone, somewhere, would die, would you press it? It's an abuse of the trolley problem but ask all your friends next time there's a lull in dinner conversation.
Still, I hope that we're r planting trees elsewhere to make up for the lost of trees in this instance.
1. Government welcomes Google.
2. Google starts construction, fails to file paperwork at some level.
3. 1,000's of trees decompose naturally somewhere.
4. Local community upset that Google is building what Government welcomed while allowing tree decomposition to reign unchecked. The horror, the horror.
5. Sea levels rise, 86.5% of humanity is wiped out, and a great famine ensues.
6. Meanwhile, in the State of California, taxpayer funding is squandered on supertrains to nowhere that noone wants, instead of clearing fuel from forests, while the electric company shuts off the electricity, to prevent forest fires.
As much as I dislike big evil corporations, I'm gonna give google a pass on forgetting to hand in their homework this time.
Compared to the State of California, they seem to be doing a good job.
disclaimer: this summary contains at least one forward looking statement :|
Does this have to be posted daily?
Yeah guys. Let's do more AI posts, we never get enough of those
This is an AI post. Because it's about a data center that will host AI computers
Nice, let's repost it tomorrow then
Pretty clickbait. No fan of Google, but it sounds like they just jumped the gun slightly on the clearing and it would have been/will be perfectly fine once the permit comes in, which I'm sure it will unless their planning process is totally broken. If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees to build the thing you sold them the land to do.
Finland has something like 20 billion trees and plant tens of millions a year for forestry. The bloody country is nothing but trees. 250k isn't nothing but it's hardly the end of the world.
> If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees
When you own a piece of land containing a forest area there are typically (in most of europe at least) certain rules and regulation as to what you can do and what sort of permissions you need. Eg you may be required to keep some patches of the forest vs just cutting down everything, there can be places you cannot clear the forest completely etc.
Even if google could eventually anyway build some datacenters in that area, it does not mean that they were allowed to do what they did.
But otherwise I agree that this transaction should never have happened in the first place.
You cannot disobey the bureaucrats. Only they may say what you can do, and when you can do it.
As opposed to megacorporations doing whatever the fuck they want, and fuck everyone.
No, that's not what it's opposed to.
There's a vast ocean of middle ground.
The assessment exists for a reason. There are other issues like runoff for example.
Parenting-level policy response recommendation: once the trees grow back, you can proceed.
According to Grok that represents ~0.1% of total trees cut down in Finland per year
It's not about the trees. We got plenty.
But if the very first thing you do on the construction site is disregarding the local laws and regulations, when they were explicitly told about environment assessment requirement, it's not exactly favorable first impression, is it?
Disregard requires intent. Are you sure that's what happened here? Or was it an administrative error?
Value of a mature tree is normally several thousand euros here (I don't know about Finland). Multipled by 250K. Times 3 -- a decent factor for illegal acts. Would be a appropriate compensation for Finland.
A 50 year old spruce is about €50 in Finland - from the map the trees don’t look that mature.
You can buy a similar sized forest for €50-150K.
https://www.metsatilat.fi/en/osta?property_type=forest&area_...
Extrapolating to Finland’s entire forested area, Finland is sitting on hundreds of trillions of wealth!
Or maybe this is a bad measure?
You also forgot that Google owned the trees that they cut down, so they would be compensating themselves.
The debate is about the order in which a contractor pulled permits. It’s silly how much people are obsessing over some trees being cut down. This happens with all development.
Google was cutting their own trees in their own forest, not someone else's trees.
What the news is about is "environmental impact study".
To do the math, that would be 5.25 billion euros.
Shall they pay themselves for their own trees?
This wasn't merely an illegal logging operation. They also stripped off the topsoil, and failed to prevent runoff into local waterways.
For Google, a fine of ~EUR 5 billion is a rounding error in their cost of doing business.
> "They also stripped off the topsoil,"
That's a perfectly normal and environmentally conscious thing to do before laying down concrete foundations. Topsoil is recycled and sold to farms. To leave it in place would pointlessly waste an ecological resource.
The environmentally conscious thing to do the necessary environmental impact assessments before clear-cutting the land.
According to the Guardian article, which it the source the NY Post used, if those trees were illegally logged, they cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.
Do you know if the law also prohibits the topsoil from being sold to farms?
> rounding error
Not really? That’d be ~1% of global revenue and ~2% of opex? Sure they could pay it, but it’s not a negligible amount.
It really does depend on your time frame, does it not?
This is part of a 2 year, €13 billion investment by Google, so €5 billion is nearly all of the yearly investment of a single project.
On the other hand, Finland is only a part of Google's world-wide projects, and these projects are expected to produce revenue for, what, decades?
A 10-year time frame changes your numbers to ~0.1% and ~0.2%.
You don't see any activists, green peace, NGOs, Al Gore protesting against data centers and as well as global warming and climate change.
Exactly this. Brought the same point here and got my comment flagged.
It's like they don't care about climate change or global warming.
They should make Larry and Sergey replant each one themselves.
Hey Google, did you cut trees in Finland?
250k trees is a number so big that it is hard to wrap your mind around.
Also sucks to think that mature trees take a really long time to grow. For example, Oak trees often live 150 - 300 years.
> 250k trees is a number so big that it is hard to wrap your mind around.
Finland alone has around 22 billion trees. People seriously underestimate how many trees there are on Earth.
This wasn't some ancient oak forest, but rather a pine tree plantation that would be cut for timber in a timely rotation of cutting and planting anyway. If you want to build anything in Finland, you first cut the trees. Because trees grow everywhere, and if you leave a place unattended for a little while, it gets reclaimed by the forest.
So no, cutting the trees isn't the topic. The topic is the skipped bureaucracy. Outcome would be the same, but of course you need to follow the steps first.
The corruption from politicians and the greed of big companies are literally destroying the world. How is it possible that something like this could happen? 250k trees cutted down on Muhos and other 150k on Otanmäki just to build data centers? This is madness, absolute madness.
I don't get it, what did they expect when they sold a 3x2km area to Google to build a data center?
The space around the town is entirely cultivated land for tens of kms across, hundreds of times the land that they sold to Google- and that land too once had been forest and was felled by the Finns to make space for agriculture. Is anyone outraged about this?
Difference is that most people/companies try to follow laws while doing that.
Also the entity selling the land is ofc not the same as the entity enforcing the law. I assume that everyone was kind of expecting that they would follow the laws.
Ok, I don't know the details, but if the land had been re-zoned for industrial use, it was obvious that it was going to be cleared of the forest.
The weird part is that they would’ve gotten the right permit in a few weeks. Now they are just sending a message that they are above the law. Even if you are allowed to do something, it doesn’t mean there isn’t limitations how you can do it.
What was that thing about evil? /s
Was it don’t be evil, or something else?
> What was that thing about evil? /s
Something something Dark Side?
a true punnishment for google would be bieng forced to perform a total ecosystem restoration, every bug, worm, critter, plant, and micro organism, cm by cm, trees ,mosses, the whole thing, purchased from indivuals one tiny bit at a time in a way thatcaused zero further damage. minimum cost will be 500 billion dollars and would serve notice on the real value of ecosystems, ie: replacement value