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
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.
Literal corruption
dont want people to know how badly it is polluting the area around data centers, and the cost of electricity, and fuel.
Why the F do we care about what US companies wants? Stay the F away from EU soil if decency, ethics and laws doesn’t fit your style.
Politicians care because they literally get bribes for this shit
It said they lobbied for it, which means that the politicians don’t care, so they give them something they do care about so that they support it anyway, namely money.
It’s the whole reason 99% of politicians choose that career in the first place. All they have to do is look like they don’t support something that the wealthy want them to support, and they’ll be given buckets of money to sway their vote.
There is a price for everything
