Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their datacentres, an investigation has found, with demands to block a database of green metrics from public view written almost word for word into EU rules.
The secrecy provision, which the European Commission added to its proposal almost verbatim after industry lobbying in 2024, hinders scrutiny of the pollution that individual datacentres emit. It leaves researchers with just national-level summaries of their energy footprints.
The rise of AI chatbots has spurred a boom in the construction of chip-filled warehouses with a hunger for power that is being met, in part, by burning fossil gas. Legal scholars warn the blanket confidentiality clause may fall foul of EU transparency rules and the Aarhus convention on public access to environmental information.
“In two decades, I cannot recall a comparable case,” said Prof Jerzy Jendrośka, who spent 19 years on the body overseeing the convention and teaches environmental law at the University of Opole in Poland. “This clearly seems not to be in line with the convention.”
I keep reading about lobbying. I don’t fully understand how it works. Are there requirements for disclosure, approval and public transparency, or is this just something individual politicians or groups can do just like that?
It’s a bribe by another name.
It’s not an illegal bribe, if we legalise it and call it lobbying. *taps head
But why do individual politicians or groups have the power to get these things through? Is it not subjected to a majority vote or something?
In any parliament that does more than just rubber stamping whatever the executive does, you have committees that focus on specific topics. Members of Parliament specialise on some of those. There they actually draft stuff that then the full assembly is voting on. That is the only way it can work as you need people with some understanding on the topic to draft stuff. No person can be specialist in everything.
So you might have a few to maybe a few dozen people sitting in a committee. A few from each party and usually you also have at least obe person per party in charge of the topic for respective party. The Committee can not control the vote in the assembly (so it needs to keep in mind what the plenum will find acceptable) but it controls what the Plenum will vote on.
This is of course a great target for lobbying. However it dies not help on controversial issues where the Plenum will is ready to vote everything down.
Because a free society does require the ability for citizens to petition their government (imo).
Corporate lobbying is just what happens when that’s not properly regulated
because you need individual votes to make up any majority
So the lobbying is, in each particular instance, of potentially 100+ people (in the case of EU parliament 300 or so +), likely across parties? That seems difficult to organize, at first sight.
Lobbyists are people working on behalf of companies whose job is to meet up with politicians to discuss their issues. Typically that involves some back and forth that may or may not be considered bribery.
You want a law to protect your business? You go talk to lawmakers behind closed doors about how some laws are needed to better protect children and also data centers, and subtly let them know that maybe your company might have a job for them in the future.
Those lawmakers then go out and propose these laws and they sell the idea to other lawmakers who approve them for the children and datacenters.
So mostly not a consequence specifically of lobbying, if the majority votes due to actual conviction. Rather of disinformation/laziness, which will affect non-lobby initiated proposals too.
Lobbying on its own is not the issue. Nurses’ lobbies and teachers’ lobbies, for example, work for a good cause.
The issue is that lobbying is done in private, and citizens don’t hear about anything until laws are proposed, by which time they already have momentum and are very hard to fight. And once laws are enacted, it’s even harder to reverse them.
Yeah, it is indeed external influence which somewhat competes with democracy. What’s really bad is the reaching of consensus within the government via mostly trust in designated experts, instead of the voters individually studying the topic.
If you are asking specifically about the EU, there lobbying rules in place for Parliament, Commission and Council. Lobbyists who want to enter their premise are required to register in a public list where among others the purpose of their lobbying, who they are lobbying for etc has to be recorded. Reputable big lobbying firms do that. But of course one can also do lobbying outside of those buildings.
Also, there is ar least some law enforcement happening. See the Quatar scandal in the European Parliament. While Quatar is openly bribing US authorities, without consequences, Quatar’s secret bribing of MPEs has led to MEPs losing their office and facing prosecution for corruption. The EU has also strengthened its own means for prosecution by establishing the European Public Prossecutor Office which is fully independent from the Commission unlike OLAF from which it took over this job.
All in all, control of lobbying is vastly insufficient but the EU is still doing more than many nonetheless.
Ok and they still need majority vote… often, at least? In which case there seem to be a lot of politicians who are just misinformed (if the lobbying has negative consequences), which doesn’t relate to lobbying specifically but their general decision making.
You always need a majority in Plenum but the people specialised on the topic arealso advising party colleagues. It is impossible to get into the details of every proposal. Therefore it depends a lot on how controversial a topic is. For high profile legislation MEPs in the plenum might have a closer look themselves and make up their own mind but on low profile stuff they might simply follow the recommendation of their own guy(s) in the comittee.
PS: Lobbying is not always bad and if it is bad depends also on what political views you have. NGOs and Unions are lobbyists as well. But in many cases lobbying is indeed bad, especially when lobbyists are trying to hide their true nature and their traces.
Ok makes sense, we then have basically indirect influence of the majority via trust in smaller groups of designated specialists.
It’s supposed to be a way (groups of) people can make their case to the legislative branch to inform them about their issues and propose ways to resolve them.
In reality it’s just legal corruption used by magacorporations to screw over the aforementioned people.
The reality of the situation is more or less clear, but it helps to understand how things are supposed to work. They make their case and then what? does the audience decide on its own? Otherwise it seems difficult to buy the entire… voting majority?
Not everything is voted on of course, some things are just decided by smaller committees.
And for things that are voted on they “buy” few vocal debaters who convince the rest with bad reasoning that sounds legit.
The part with the smaller committees sounds anti-democratic. The later is a different problem (politicians being misinformed/lazy is not specific to lobbying)
It’s the way the world works. Not every decision can go through a plenary session. Nothing would get done that way.
The latter is obviously not specific to lobbying, but it is the way they get their plans across. Not everyone in the parliament can be as well informed about every issue they vote on. If everyone had to read in to every detail of every single issue that they vote on, again nothing would get done.
So if we want to get things done we need to accept that the system isn’t flawless. That doesn’t mean we can’t curb lobbying though. We need to improve the regulations on that. But of course, it is strongly opposed by lobbyists who hold a lot of power.