I read about the displaced wildlife. This is really horrific. Their government should ban Google from the country, take back their land and make them pay to reforest. Fuck Google. I was a little complacent with my Gmail but I'm done. This is just fucking awful. In this state of global warming these assholes ripped up a whole forest. Fuck them.

The government knew this was coming when they approved the data center. This is purely theatrical outrage. Those Representatives have been bought and paid for.

It’s only illegal if you do something about it.

Fine them $1 Billion per tree, AND they have to pay to replace every single tree at its market value for it's age.

Once that's all done, then they can request permission to build a new data center, which will be declined. Fuck Google.

Fuck you Pichai, you fucking banchode.

I bet their politicians allow it to happen.

Last week, Google’s Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, apologised for the forest clearings but claimed the company had acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time”.

That understanding being "it's more profitable to just do it and pay the fine"

This is a nasty thing to do without proper permits and I fully support Google getting slapped for it. For a country who has practically relied on forestry for 100+ years, the native Finnish subcontractors that everyone uses for these things are surprisingly bad at doing it properly. Last year another company casually crushed over some protected freshwater pearl mussels while doing cuts -- which was enviromentally speaking actually a much worse thing than what Google did this year. Nobody outside of Finland probably heard about it though, because there was no "big evil company" involved.

The final responsibility is still Google's though, of course, but those subcontractors really should have more sense and understanding in what they're doing.

All that said, let's calibrate the magnitude of this disaster. They felled 300-400 hectares of commercial forest. That's about 0.06% of the annual forest harvest in Finland.

So do something.

So I assume just a minor fine and some angry words?

The "move fast, break things" shtick. They mean laws with it. Worst case, you pay a fine.

So then remove the data center once it's built. Tit for tat.

Each tree is priceless, and the forest is more than the sum of its parts.

Expropriate Google's assets to make up for some of the loss.

There should be criminal investigations over that and prosecution of Google employees or their contractors, whoever was operating in Finland (and someone had to). If that was indeed all legal, than laws need to be changed.

250,000?! Jesus Christ

'See when you're rich, they let you do it".

All because normies can't take it upon themselves to do any research and change search engines and stop using google products...we gave them this power.

I hate people.

“When will these Fins rise up and do something? Don’t they see what is happening and they are just sitting around doing nothing. They voted for this.”