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.”
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.