Spyke

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Microsoft using wetlands and native gardens to 'camouflage' data center sites by blending them into nature — critics blast the 'biomimicry' effort as 'lipstick on a pig' amid a 20-year gas power deal

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/microsoft-is-using-wetlands-and-native-gardens-to-camouflage-20-plus-data-center-sites-by-blending-them-into-nature-critics-blast-the-biomimicry-effort-as-lipstick-on-a-pig-amid-a-20-year-gas-power-dealOpen link View original on reddthat.com

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Gladaed

feddit.org

If you cannot accept them doing good and reward them for the good there is no incentive to act good. Acting badly, covertly mustn't be the best way to do things.

prole reply

lemmy.blahaj.zone

Yeah no, that's not how regulation works. These aren't babies or dogs, we don't bribe them with "positive reinforcement." That does not work.

Gladaed reply

feddit.org

But they are profit motivated companies. If they get hatred for doing good it is unprofitable to act good. Of course they aren't babies, but creating an environment in which dystopian companies farr best is... Unwise.

DarkCloud

lemmy.world

I mean Microsoft is currently preferable to Google.

Microsoft:

Microsoft’s “biomimicry” program is reshaping the land around its data centers with restored wetlands and native gardens to help the buildings blend into local ecosystems at 20-plus sites, reports The Verge. Critics question the company’s motives after recent energy deals, such as a 20-year deal inked in June to buy power from a planned Chevron gas plant in West Texas. Public Citizen’s Texas director, Adrian Shelley, called the plan “basically lipstick on a pig.”

The Mount Pleasant site, home to Fairwater, which Microsoft calls the “world’s most powerful AI data center,” has 100 acres of prairie and forest in a Lamparek Creek restoration with the Root-Pike Watershed Initiative Network. Its executive director, Dave Giordano, told the outlet that Microsoft developed its stormwater ponds with forebays to retain sediment, one of a number of accommodations for the environment. “Not all data center companies are the same,” he said. It is a living example of the company’s answer to AI data center backlash.

Google:

As Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments.

Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors started clearing trees in the area months ago, raising the alarm bells at the Finnish Nature Conservation Association.

But it's ultimately leverage for killing the planet and making a destructive technology seem acceptable. We've seen "industrial parks". It's a bandaid on a heart attack.