These Angry Dutch Farmers Really Hate Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

These Angry Dutch Farmers Really Hate Microsoft

wired.com

57 pointsclouddrover128 comments

If you ask yourself what the possible benefits are for dutch people. Absolutely nothing. Companies like Microsoft have complex tax constructions so not a single cent ends up in the dutch economy. Next. These datacenters are huge energy consumers in an already scarse market. Drives prices up. Nobody wants to live close to these ugly heavily guarded places. At the same time the Netherlands faces a housing crisis often related to lack lack of suitable land. Now used by the monster buildings. There are many more important aspects why you dont want this things on your country. I wouldnt be suprised if in this case Microsoft bribed a few non voted EU representatives to put pressure on local dutch politicians. The whole process is shady and intransparant.

>Companies like Microsoft have complex tax constructions so not a single cent ends up in the dutch economy.

Why are the Dutch angry with EU and Microsoft and not with their elected Dutch government officials who set up these legal tax dodging opportunities to attract such corporations in the first place?

They made the rules, Microsoft (and other companies) are just following them.

They actually just had an election sweep where the incumbent government got punished badly for their perceived elitist policies.

Because these companies have no morals. They dont care if their foreign factory doesnt follow American laws regarding work safety and other regulations. As long as the local laws permits them they do anything what is possible. Only when things become public and affects their reputation things might change. Only then. Thats why we dont welcome them.

Don’t make your laws more lax than even the ones in America then? We’re talking about Holland here not some poor and corrupt developing country..

It’s no great secret than corporations are generally profit seeking and will try to utilize any “legal loophole” they can find. It would not be reasonable to expect them not to when the system they operate in strongly incentivize them to prioritize profit over anything else. I mean “nice corporations” will simply be outcompeted by the ruthless ones…

If all arable land of Netherlands would be covered in datacenters, they would draw more energy than the entire world production, and would skyrocket the NL GDP simply from the services required, such as building, installation, guarding, decommissioning and recycling, powering them etc.

The capital density per square foot is 4 to 5 times orders of magnitude higher than agriculture, to suggest the two compete for land use is utterly ridiculous.

Agriculture competes with urbanization and it will always lose, as it should, because it's not an inherently superior or moral use of land: most of agriculture are ecologically disastrous monocultures drenched in herbicides and fertilizers. A corn field is not a bucolic utopia, but a carefully managed anthropic environment where nature was all but banished for the economic welfare of the rural population.

> most of agriculture are ecologically disastrous monocultures drenched in herbicides and fertilizers.

In the EU they use substantially less pesticides and fertilizers than we do in the US, and have as good or better yields.

Maybe that’s just setting a low bar.

Dutch agriculture is anything but a bucolic idyl, instead consisting of very large industrial operations owned by an ever decreasing number of companies that produce vast amounts of food for export using imported feed and plowing the manure that remains, truly stupendous amounts, into the soil thereby rendering it effectively dead.

Large tracts of the province of Drente, formerly poor and backward and hence, in a way, pretty, have been taken over by lily plantations (yes, the flower) that are absolutely drenched in pesticides.

Most food crops are grown in enormous greenhouses that take monstrous amounts of energy to heat and that are lit up 24 hours a day to increase yields, making it difficult for people in surrounding villages to sleep. They are automated as much as possible and the work that can not be automated is done by underpaid immigrant workers living in horrible conditions.

So, yes, Dutch agriculture has “as good or better yields”, but it’s still ecologically disastrous.

It would be a lot more ecologically disastrous to move operations to less suitable areas.

Wouldn’t most other places in Europe be much more suitable though just because of lower population density (and energy prices in some cases)?

I meant that agriculture in our fertile delta is way more efficient than trying to do the same in other countries with less suitable areas.

The agricultural lobby puts this out a lot, but it’s not true. The pig farmers and the dairy farmers that are causing the most problems require vast imports of fodder grown elsewhere. The efficiency of a lot of greenhouse agriculture is questionable as well (which was made obvious when a not insignificant chunk of its production was wound down when supplies of cheap Russian gas dried up.

So energy prices increasing by 300%, eating away profits, on top of record inflation is proof that the whole business is inefficient? Lol, no. Even if a financial shockwave told you anything about the efficiency of green houses (it does not) you can’t base your argument on a war induced fluke.

If a business can only exist if energy prices are unrealistically low, then, yes, it is inefficient.

So the only time energy is priced realistically is during wartime. Noted.

Were they unrealistically low though? Wind/solar/hydro are supposed to be much cheaper than fossil fuels longterm..

And gas prices are more or less back to where they were before the invasion.

So we're sacrificing the Dutch nature out of altruistic motives? And the rest of the Dutch people don't get a say about the biodiversity in their country, the farmers should make this noble sacrifice on their behalf, for the good of the world? Or is it perhaps just a transparent excuse to keep polluting until only grass, stinging nettles, and blackberries remain?

You’re not sacrificing Dutch nature. Your argument is based on what you hear from doomsayers who make a lot of noise based on incomplete research. The grass, stinging nettles and blackberries you saw on TV only went a couple of meters deep at the edge of forests. It’s not like it takes over entire forests. They are now researching how nitrogen from farms actually deposits, because everything we know until now has been modelled as a dome, while it’s much more likely it’s a low hanging mist.

can the excess heat of the datacenter be used to heat up the greenhouses?

This was the promise originally but it turned out to be impossible. As it turns out, data center waste water is nowhere near warm enough to use for heating.

It would work if you would put the server directly into the greenhouses, 25°C is cool enough for servers and warm enough for plants. But the expense of having moisture, bug and dirt resistant servers and technicians would far outweigh the energy efficiency.

Hahaha - never thought of it that way. Given how dirt free a lot of modern greenhouse agriculture is, it could conceivably be done.

if that works, why doesn't it work to put them next to each other and pump the warm air from the server into the greenhouse? would that already have to much loss?

>Agriculture competes with urbanization and it will always lose, as it should, because it's not an inherently superior or moral use of land

Easy for you to say when you have a full stomach. See what happened in countries that disregard their farmers or agricultural sectors. Food price soared, and social unrest set in leading to crime, anarchy and governments collapsing.

People need to eat, simple. Hungry people will eventually turn to crime to survive, including the people paid form your taxes to protect you (police, military, etc)

Being agriculturally self sufficient is essential for any country.

The Netherlands is tiny and the 2nd largest agricultural exporter in the world by value, after the US. After the hunger winter in 1944 we became obsessed with food production but there is such a thing as too much.

The “export” argument is so stupid when you see how far it is exported. On a US scale this mostly would be within state borders.

It's not stupid, they're literally exporting it. And I have to add, it's a whole new level of Americentrism that I have never seen before to define the word "export" in terms of the distances between US states.

It is stupid, because it just makes sense to have agriculture in a fertile area like the river delta in NL. And it doesn’t make sense to focus on protecting the very species that are not able to flourish without human intervention.

So, focus on protecting species that do well in nitrogen poor areas in the areas that are actually nitrogen poor.

If we move production around to average everything out we’ll end up with a more homogeneous Europe, less production and less biodiversity.

You're turning things around. These species are suffering because of human nitrogen pollution. Where does all the excess nitrogen come from that is preventing these species from flourishing? Oh hey, turns out it's mostly agriculture.

Most species we want to protect now only thrived/peaked because people extracted nitrogen from the area, like in the case of heath fields and woodlands. Or became sand plains because we repeatedly burned down the forests for military reasons.

I don’t know if you know the history of your environment, but farmers do.

why? export within countries of the european union is comparable to export within states of the USA. i don't see the problem here.

>Being agriculturally self sufficient is essential for any country.

This is nothing to do with Netherlands’ own food self-sufficiency.

Let them eat datacentres indeed.

The counterpoint here is what gross tonnage per annum does the population of the Netherlands consume .. and in the event of supply chain disruptions, should (say) NATO hiccup, to what degree are they self sufficient?

Farming and urban land uses aren't a straight either|or, they're a complex need both.

60 percent of dutch meat is exported, we can do with a whole lot less.

Exported doesn't mean throwing in the trash, somebody is using and depending on it.

Also, most of it is only exported for a couple of miles to our nearest neighbors.

I know this meat is still used ofcourse. But with a country as small as ours, there simply are better uses of the space for our country and people.

There is no space. The land belongs to the farmers. It’s not up to you to decide what should be done with it.

Perhaps we can stop their subsidies and see if they're suddenly willing to sell voluntarily.

We can then have "you won an argument" sticker for breakfast.

Most NL farmers are in favor of stopping all subsidies if it means that it also stops in other countries. Because unlike in other countries subsidies in NL come with lots of strings attached.

Interesting, but that doesn't particularly address why it's important to keep agricultural skils current and land viable.

eg: In a pinch meat animals can be slaughtered and eaten and what they once ate can be fed instead to humans.

It's the insurance of being not far removed from near sufficiency.

Yep, plenty of space to grow food is metaverse.

This is a moot point for about 60 years. Europe, like the US, have massive agricultural overproductions which distort the world markets, due to subsidies. Most of the disastrous monocultures are used to feed bovines, a very inefficient source of protein for the human diet.

Basically, it's a lifestyle and politico-economic choice, not a need.

Indeed, it hasn't been an issue since the last big war in Europe and we can all see how unlikely such a thing is to happen again and that there's no need to have an insurance policy of any sort.

Where does this need for an insurance policy stops? If Europe's trade and defense agreements are insuficient, then perhaps each country should aim for a 3x overproduction, to cover those bad agricultural years? Maybe each city should too? Or perhaps each citizen, we should all retreat to rural homesteads and live on pasture-fed cow meat - a demonstrably unsustainable dystopia that will turn the entire planet into a giant ball of dung and guarantee eventual starvation for every sentient creature inhabiting it? But at least the rural voters would be among the last to die, so there's that.

Now you're just being silly.

The answer lies between your initial zero and your over dramatic 3x imaginary ball of dung.

If your government is sensible and transparent I'm sure there are public domain white papers that cover their discussions and recommendations which might make for an interesting read and put an end to this silly posturing.

>The answer lies between

Where? You are just expressing a political preference and hand-waving to unnamed experts. By all accounts, Europe is overproducing agricultural products and the large part of EU's policies are aimed at limiting this surplus while limiting ecological impact.

There is much more dung than we should have, yet people continue to peddle this idiotic 19th century starvation worldview, where a nation's agricultural output is a measure of its success. An extreme form of this ideology, cognate to Lebensraum, has survived to this day in Russia's internal political discourse, so perhaps you are a bit confused about what's really going on now at Europe's borders.

Except in the Netherlands, where urbanization is actually losing from agriculture. We have a structural housing shortage while 54% of this tiny land's surface is used for agriculture, and then mostly for those disastrous monocultures.

Dutch farmers are probably the most privileged group in the country and they are fighting tooth and nail to preserve that status no matter the cost.

Anything they say or complain about should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

It sounds so arrogant to say farmers are privileged, while these families have worked for generations to build these farms. There are even people advocating to take the farms from them, if necessary by force. I don’t blame the farmers if they want to hold on to every inch, and to fight for every right they still have.

No one "worked for generations". We each get one lifetime, that's it.

My emotion don’t care about your prdantry. I worked on a farm together with my father and grandfather. My grandfather’s grandfather started it as a dirt poor peat digger who lived in a peat house and worked till the day he died. Say what you will about my brothers farm, but I will physically stop anyone trying to it from him. He does a great job producing quality products with minimal emissions, while maintaining the great landscape and animals around him. If you want the destroy all that in favor of datacenters, you’re the problem, not him.

That dubious take, even if true, doesn't give them the right to destroy nature of the entire country.

Among other things, their influence on the water management policy has an effect of private homes literally sinking in certain parts of the country.

They don’t destroy nature any more than cities and datacenters do. We just picked the wrong species to protect.

They are not taking the farms from them, they are buying them.

Agro-industry in the Netherlands is unsustainable and all the parties involved know it. Whatever they say, what we're watching here is just the buyout negotiations.

Buying them, while preventing they start over elsewhere. And also, all savings in emissions are used to expand emissions in other industries. That doesn’t sound fair, and isn’t.

First of all your claim that all savings in emissions are used to expand emissions in other industries needs a reference, but even if this claim were true, one could easily argue that more people on the Netherlands would benefit (for example) from affordable housing, than from exporting powdered milk or greenhouse tomatoes

Check https://www.ammoniakrechten.nl

Also, farmers don’t have to disappear for more housing. It seems the government does a great job pitting a lot of its citizens against farmers by lying that they are holding back new housing development, while the real issue is a lack of builders, too stringent guidelines and a lack of building materials.

Inheriting a farm is privilege.

Yes it was a real privilege to see my parents struggle financially, without enjoying things that are commonplace in other families, like ‘free weekends’ and ‘holidays’. All so they could make the investments that were necessary to keep the farm afloat. There was no glamour. They weren’t “millionaires” with the accompanying lifestyle.

And it’s not like you magically inherit a million dollar farm either. You saw the suffering that went into it from the day you were born. That has a cost and takes a toll. It just comes with a lot of responsibility and I don’t think you should envy that.

They spent their whole life working that job, not just 5 days a week from 9 to 5 and the kids started helping as soon as they were able to. Like 5 years old. They did enjoy it, because it’s honest work. But they didn’t get to reap the rewards like they would have gotten in other companies.

Saying that any result of hard work is a privilege with a negative connotation makes me puke. You know literally nothing about this life. And you should stop commenting on it.

No, it sounds arrogant and privileged to make it sound as if only farmers have worked hard for generations. We all have.

Saying you worked hard has nothing to do with privilege. You’re repeating some of the words you heard elsewhere out of context.

And unlike you, farming families invested almost everything they made back into the farm, for their children, in order to see it continue. And the children (like me) who don’t continue on that farm all have to agree that a large part of their inheritance is gifted to the brother or sister who does. That’s something you only see in well run family companies. The entire family wants to see it succeed.

That’s one reason why the BBB got a lot more votes anyone expected. Nearly everyone in NL is related to a farming family and they have gathered a lot of sympathy because arrogant unsympathetic politicians and citydwellers are bashing their heritage and preying on their land.

> You’re repeating some of the words you heard elsewhere out of context.

That is quite an arrogant claim, sir. You know not me, nor which words or contexts I consumed.

You certainly addressed the substance of my comment here.

You made assumptions and accusations about me ("Unlike you, ...") that I see no point in honoring that with any further comment.

> There are even people advocating to take the farms from them.

That’s the only option left on the table if they won’t shrink the livestock and diversify as farmers.

Let’s be real: it’s not like this legislation came out of the blue. Nitrogen deposition as a problem is something the sector has known about for a while. Instead of diversifying away from nitrogen emission these companies chose to double down on nitrogen washing technology. Turns out that technology doesn’t work.

Intensive livestock in the way it’s happening now doesn’t have a future in the Netherlands. I’d like to go even further and say that it makes a poor investment anywhere in the world.

Farmers are entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur means managing risks and they did that pretty poorly as a sector.

A lot of farmers invited the risk and harvested its profits. Had they diversified they would have been in much better shape.

You can’t eat your cake and have it..

Combine this with automation and you get what is happening in the western world from 1970 onward, making the rich richer the poor poorer and stagnating middle class at best.

Where and how do you get your food?

The Netherlands are the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world. They can severely reduce farming without endangering domestic food supplies.

Of course these products that are consumed would have to be produced somewhere else, but since the pollution (nitrogen) is a local problem, this would still be a net win, and not just moving the problem around.

>>The Netherlands are the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world.

Amazing! Good for them. One would think such agricultural and engineering powerhouse could solve the nitrogen problem with technology and not resort to destroying one of it's most innovative industries.

>>They can severely reduce farming without endangering domestic food supplies.

That's probably what the Germans thought when they closed their nuclear power plants. And then the invasion of Ukraine happened.

>>Of course these products that are consumed would have to be produced somewhere else, but since the pollution (nitrogen) is a local problem, this would still be a net win, and not just moving the problem around.

TIL: polluting some other third world country, with severe lack of environment standards and inefficient agriculture is called a net win.

From the restaurant and the supermarket of course? What does "arable land" and "fertile soil" have to do with my vegaburger? It comes neatly wrapped in vacuum-sealed plastic from a factory which from the outside is nearly indiscernible from one of those data centres. As long as I can get my factory-made food from building A while streaming a video of me unwrapping the stuff to the data centre in building B I'm fine so you should be as well.

For those who have read Asterix there is this scene in 'The Great Crossing' [1] where the fish monger - Kostunrix in the Dutch version, Unhygienix in the UK, Epidemix in the US - asks what the sea has to do with his fish since he gets it 'fresh from Lutetia' (Paris).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_and_the_Great_Crossing

We let companies to get away pretty much anything. Tax evasion (funnily enough paying tax __after__ expenses), environmental damages and few more.

(farms are usually companies)

It's not nothing. Building new data centers requires investment, brings employment, etc. Objectively, large companies investing many billions to open large data centers in mostly rural areas is pretty nice overall. There are some issues with energy supply being gobbled up by these companies. But arguably even that is pretty nice since it just results in huge investments in renewable energy production, which is good for the economy.

The Netherlands has a self inflicted nitrogen crisis mainly due to intensive farming. Despite being a small country, it's one of the largest food exporters in the world. E.g. it is the world's leading exporter of tomatoes. But most of those are grown in green houses. The real problem is cattle. Cows, chickens, & pigs. Intensive cattle farming is causing loads of issues with manure and the go to solution is just fertilizing grass fields, which results in a lot of emissions and poisons the water and atmosphere. To the point where it's having health impacts. The only way out is to downsize that sector. Which is of course unpopular with farmers.

EU regulations related to nitrogen emissions are causing a need to do something about emissions. One of the results of this has been to reduce speeds on highways to 100km/h (ICE cars emit lots of nitrogen). This was done by a right leaning conservative government lead by a party that actually bumped the speed limit to 130km/h a few years before that. Additionally, until they get emissions down, a lot of construction projects along highways are blocked. And of course the government is under a lot of pressure to do something about the biggest emitters next: farmers.

So, farmers don't like this and recent election rounds resulted in a victory for a new pro-farmer party. Farmers have been protesting regularly for years and of course they are not too excited about MS and others converting their farm land into data centers while finding a way around the rules against new construction. That's not because they hate MS but because they are against the whole system of rules that is putting them out of business while companies like MS get to profit and the same government that's coming after them looks the other way.

Terrible article.

"Nitrogen, produced by cars, agriculture, and heavy machinery used in construction, can be a dangerous pollutant, damaging ecosystems and endangering people's health."

Huh? Nitrogen?

But since 2015, the country has also witnessed the arrival of enormous “hyperscalers,” buildings that generally span at least 10,000 square feet".

They may have obtained that definition from here.[1] That's not a big data center. That's a small supermarket. Large data centers today are two orders of magnitude larger.

https://www.government.nl/topics/nature-and-biodiversity/the...

> Emissions of nitrogen oxides and ammonia have been too high in the Netherlands for many years. This causes excessive deposition of nitrogen, which is harmful for both nature and public health.

> Transport and industry are the main emitters of nitrogen oxides. Ammonia mainly comes from livestock manure and chemical fertilisers, which are used in the agriculture sector. Reducing the amount of nitrogen deposition is vital for the sake of our health, the quality of our nature areas and for the sustainability of food production. That is why the Dutch government is introducing measures for industry, agriculture, transport and the construction sector.

> A large part of the nitrogen deposition can be traced to the agriculture sector and to sources outside the Netherlands. The remainder is attributable to households, road transport, international shipping, industry, construction, energy generation and waste processing.

Nitrogen run-off can be a major pollutant in waterways.

It can either be over-fertilization, or cow dung and urine.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024564/

https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/sources-and-solutions-....

While nitrogen run-off is a large problem in many parts of the world, that's not what is being referred to here. This is about air pollution from their diesel farm equipment (and likely things like heating systems for greenhouses and animal barns etc.)

I know its confusing but 'the nitrogen problem' does indeed refer to fixed nitrogen run-off pollution

No, it's mostly about ammonia from lifestock.

The "nitrogen" problem is about NO2, NO3 and NH3, where most of the NO is from transport and industry, but the NH3 is from bio industry.

Huge factory-like pig and poultry farms. The ammonia gets in the air, spreads and hugely enriches the soil of nature that can't handle that. And way too much manure that is spread out over grass land and runs off into surface water and groundwater.

We import a lot of animal feed and artificial fertilizer, then the N in those ends up in our nature.

I have lived in zeewolde near the place of the datacenter, I can tell you that its massive, especially considering how small the country is and how densely populated it is. Historically, flevoland was created for the express purpose of creating fertile land to farm on. The only reason they didn't build it on industrial land was because of anti-competitive deals with the zeewolde municipality in order to reduce the land usage costs. Also, there are no big supermarkets in the Netherlands.

From an american perspective I can understand that this doesnt make alot of sense. but zeewolde is just shy of 60km from schiphol airport. Distances, building sizes and infrastructure and everything else has adapted really well to this dense country, this datacenter is not.

As a Dutch man, there is very large one near supermarket...

Adres: Pampusweg 13, 1398PT Muiden, Noord-Holland

It's basically the only one in the country.

For very large values of one:

https://www.ah.nl/winkels?storeType=XL

I don't know all of these, but it seems that nearly all are still inside the city, have a local function and are reasonably reachable by something else than a car. The ones I know are still smaller than the average French hypermarché, and there are far fewer than them. The Muiden mall was the first one and caused a shift in policy to strongly discourage moving shops to the city edge.

> Also, there are no big supermarkets in the Netherlands.

When I was in the Netherlands there were a couple of AH XL that were pretty big, at least for my standards.

Not sure about how much square meters they occupied. And they were useful :)

Nitrogen refers to several nitrogen containing compounds. I think the proper term is "reactive nitrogen", and the main ones are NOx and NH3.

These cause problems with biodiversity in dutch nature, and the problem has been in the dutch news for so long they no longer explain the term.

The EU keep pumping out these absolutely ridiculous green policies that have crippling effects locally. Recently they brought out a new energy efficiency directive which could cause up to 50% (!) of Finnish flats & houses to require sizeable renovations.

Brussels have been very effective in transforming a useful economic union into a centrally managed dystopian nightmare that a lot of people will soon be willing to burn down regardless of consequence - myself included.

They can only make never-effective fig leaf policies because actual good green policies would upset the applecart.

Indeed. If you really wanted to implement effective green policies, they would involve reducing the global population to around half a billion max and keeping them at pre-industrial levels of technological development.

Is this sarcasm?

No, straight up, that's what needs to be done. I think that the current population-management fantasy supported by the WEF and quite a few on Hackernews -- building enormous arcologies in which to warehouse much of the world's citizenry -- is going to run into technical challenges that threaten the entire project, before they even get to the massive "people hate living there" problems.

We can get to actually zero carbon emissions if we adopt simple living without any industrial technology, but we lose the capacity to feed eight billion people without Green Revolution style agtech, so we will have to make do with fewer people. We have to face up to the reality that industrial civilization is widely regarded, by people with deep understanding of the issues, as a bad move.

Do you think building thousands of nuclear reactors would be a good idea to do before trying that?

Most of the criticism of those policies is false or misleading. You always need to be careful to research the actual policy instead of the media soundbite as the two usually diverge quite a bit.

There are perverse incentives at work. When the EU does something right the national politicians usually take credit (when they convert a EU directive to local law), and when a national politician is struggling with a local problem, often of their own creation, they will blame the EU. It was generally perceived as harmless to use the EU as the scapegoat, but since Brexit showed there are real harms some of the politicians have dialed it back. Not all though.

Which is not to say the EU does nothing wrong, but I find the standard of policymaking at the EU level usually exceeds that at the local level.

Balkenende warned the EU the Natura 2000 guidelines would bring all economic activity in The Netherlands to a halt. Because there is no way we will reach the goals that were stated there. The EU commissioner basically laughed and told him to deal with it.

Lots of politicians saw the writing on the wall. Nobody had the balls to tackle the real issue and change the guidelines at the EU level. It will be interesting to see how this will pan out.

This is a negotiating position (!) by the EU Parliament, not a finished regulation or decree.

Regarding the actual content: If adopted as proposed (which is unlikely), it would force owners of the 30% of least energy efficient houses (compared to the national, not EU-wide, housing stock) to upgrade their houses to come in line with the next higher energy efficiency class – by 2033, so ten years from now.

I own several buildings, both quite old (1960s), as well as brand new (net-positive energy). Improving an existing building in the worst energy efficiency class to come in line with the proposed standards is in most cases an expense in the low five figures, which (at least in Germany) will be subsidized with up to 50% of the costs. Lower energy consumption will in most cases pay for the renovation within a few years. Many of the measures (i.e. new heating source and radiators, new windows) would have to be done on those houses anyway, because the old systems reach their end of life.

So what are people complaining about, exactly?

> I own several buildings

> expense in the low five figures

> So what are people complaining about, exactly?

This is an incredible take.

Many people don’t have the luxury to just spend five figures on a mandatory house renovation.

It will be heavily subsidized. Nobody will get into trouble for not being able to afford insulation. That's not how the law in European countries works.

Just to underline how property law works in many EU countries: I have a tenant who is actively destroying the apartment he lives in. It is still practically impossible to dissolve my rent agreement with him, because the courts see it as likely that he would end up homeless.

There is simply no conceivable reality in which our current system of laws would force a cash-strapped, 80 year old house owner out of his property simply because they can't follow up on EU energy regulations. We have plenty of legal safeguards to weigh social outcomes against the impact of laws and regulations.

Let me get this straight:

- You own an asset worth 200,000-300,000 Euros

- The required investment, which can be spread over up to ten years, is 20,000-30,000 Euros

- You would have to make parts of this investment anyway, because your windows are leaky and your radiators are breaking

- You will recoup the costs over 5-10 years because you use less energy

- 25-50% of this investment will be covered by subsidies, the government will also provide low-interest loans for much of the rest

How is this an absurd demand to make of people who own a house?

Not to mention that 200k-300k is the absolute low end for a house. Around here you're lucky to get something for 5 times that.

There is more than just whatever urbanised area you happen to live which gave you this rather myopic view. Even in the Netherlands - where housing is expensive - €300K will give you plenty of choice [1]. In the south of Sweden it will buy you a largish villa while in the north it buys you a large farm.

[1] https://localfocus2.appspot.com/593e6715568f0 (click on municipality for an overview of prices)

For us in FIN, the bulk majority that will get hit worst are low-income rural households that aren't nearly worth 200,000k. In fact it will probably result in a lot of abandoned homes as it isn't worth investing 20k euros to renovate a 60-80k house, not that anyone is lending that money to these homes anyway.

You have perfectly demonstrated how idiotic these blanket EU-level policies are as they take no consideration of local situations.

As I wrote above, the proposed (!) regulation would be based on the national housing stock. So if you are in Finnland, the energy efficiency of your house would be compared to other finish houses, not a house in Germany. Which is the definition of "considering local situations".

Also, a quick check reveals that only about 14% of the Finish population lives in rural areas [1]. Even if every single one of those persons is a house owner and poor (unlikely, as those categories are to a certain extend mutually exclusive), it would be quite feasible for the Finish government to heavily subsidize the renovation of the entirety of the rural housing stock. Nothing in the proposed regulation would keep national governments from using policy making to implement the required goals in a socially acceptable way.

Also, what do you propose would be the alternative? Improving the energy efficiency of the housing stock is in most countries among the most efficient ways to conserve energy. Other approaches to conserve energy or produce the required energy in a sustainable way cost considerably more per kw/h than bringing a 50 year old house to a modern energy standard. And of course given the prevalence of oil and natural gas based heating systems in old houses, you actually have to invest in a new heating source to switch away from CO2-emitting energy sources, anyway.

EDIT: quick back of the envelope math suggests that it would cost the finish government 5% of the current annual budget for each of the coming ten years to invest 20.000 Euros into each of the approximately 250.000 rural houses (assuming an average occupancy of 3 people per house). Not a bad investment considering that it would be made up in a few years through energy savings.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?location...

It doesn't matter if the energy efficiency rating is based on local standards when the costs aren't. Again, there is absolutely no sense blowing 20-30k on energy renovating a house that is worth 80k.

If you don't think binding 5% of the entire country's budget for 10 years into upgrading old houses is an manic proposition I think we can safely agree there isn't a way for us to see this from the same angle and we can agree to disagree on this topic.

Spending 5% of the government budget for ten years on measures that reduce energy consumption by 20-30% for a third of the housing stock forever is a bargain. The 20-30k figure was based on my experience with German houses, I have no idea how much it would cost for the typical old finish house to come up to standard. Based on the very few rural finish houses I've seen I would guess it is less, because they would probably tend to be smaller, but that is pure speculation.

Also, of course it is worth investing 20k over 10 years into a 80k house in many circumstances. Why wouldn't it be? Yes, some people won't be able to afford this out of pocket (though I maintain that this group is smaller than you'd think). But again, the government could (and should) support this group, making it financially feasible.

In return for costing EU members $10 billion in lost corporate tax a year, the Netherlands collects just $2.2 billion in additional corporate tax a year. For every $1 dollar the Netherlands collected from the shifted profits of US corporations, the EU as a whole lost nearly $4 in corporate tax from the corporations. [1]

[1] https://taxjustice.net/press/revealed-netherlands-blocking-e...

Asking out of ignorance: Why build a data center in prime/contested real estate instead of some desolate, crumbling town in eastern europe (within the EU)? Could benefit from cold climate, cheap labour and real-estate; might even be green (if powered by soviet-era nuclear plant)

The datacenters are mostly air cooled but also use massive amounts of water when it gets warmer. Exactly during the times that f the year when citizens and farmers are called upon to use less water. How much? Independent studies showed up to 4 times more then Microsoft claimed. Furthermore the water they put back in the local lakes contains some unknown kind of chemical. So yeah I get why locals and farmers might be upset. https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/tech/artikel/5326566/datacenter-mic...

The farmers are mostly giant moaning hypocrites. They’re the cause of the nitrogen crisis.

No. The real issue is the fact that when Natura 2000 guidelines became a thing, we undemocratically decided on the wrong species to protect. And when we realized this would effectively kill all economic activity in NL, there was no way back.

Even when all farms disappear we will not reach the goals. And right now the emissions of farms are (likely) illegally exchanged for other polluting activity like airports.

We should have a hard think if it’s really necessary to ruin our country to protect species that are abundant in other countries.

Did you even read the comment?

Nitrogen fertilizers were produced with gas from Russia, now in shortage, the new environmental rules are just a guise

Archive: https://archive.is/2QW4R

The farmers are just as much in the wrong as Microsoft here. Al construction is at risk of stalling because of their excessive pollution.

They halved their emissions in just a couple of decades. If you truly want progress, be realistic with the deadlines you state and keep on giving them the incentives to continue this positive trend.

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