The Bulldozer Speaks Louder Than The Brand

Google, once the poster child of employer brands, would like you to know it cares deeply about the planet. It has the sustainability reports, a net zero pledge and armies of specialists to prove it. It has also just been ordered by a Finnish regulator to stop clearing a forest.

What happened at Muhos and Otanmäki

The Guardian reported in October that Google had cleared forest at Muhos in northern Finland to make way for a new data centre. Estimates put the loss at around 250,000 trees across 330 hectares, according to The Next Web. The topsoil went too, presumably in case anything had the cheek to grow back.

At a second site in Otanmäki, near Kajaani, Mari Annala, an ecologist with the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, estimates that roughly another 150,000 trees came down. Both figures are estimates, but together they point to around 400,000 trees and decades of established forest reduced to churned earth. Google's subsidiary, Tuike Finland, reported clearing about 330 hectares at Muhos and just under 200 at Otanmäki.

All of this began before the environmental impact assessments were finished. On 6 October, Finland's Licensing and Supervision Agency, known as LVV, ordered Tuike Finland to stop preparatory work that would significantly alter the environment until the assessments are complete, as The Next Web and Al Jazeera reported at the time.

Google's side deserves a fair hearing. A spokesperson said the company fell short of its own standards, and Antti Järvinen, its Finland country manager, apologised on the Finnish broadcaster Yle on 13 October. The company says it acted in good faith under Finland's Forest Act, and Data Center Knowledge reports that Tuike told LVV on 25 September that no permit was needed. The regulator disagrees. Google has said it will comply with the order and plans to plant trees across 130 hectares at Muhos. That is about 40% of the area cleared, give or take a few decades of growth, and conservationists say it is too little.

This is a company that has mapped the world and built models that predict protein structures. It employs some of the cleverest people on the planet. Its Finnish arm still started clearing before the paperwork was done, on an understanding that no permit was needed, which the regulator then disputed. I find the good-faith defence harder to accept than the apology. When commercial ambition met an actual forest, the forest went first and the assessments caught up later. That is the part that gets me.

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Pledges for later, damage for now

Google, Microsoft, Amazon and the rest of the hyperscalers have spent years telling us how green they are. Carbon negative. Water positive. Net zero. If there's a virtuous adjective going, they've pledged it, preferably with a deadline that's comfortably far in the future.

That's the beauty of a long-range target. You bank the applause and goodwill today, keep expanding tomorrow, and by the time anyone checks, there's a shiny new target to point at.

Microsoft promised to be carbon negative by 2030. Its 2025 sustainability report put total emissions 23.4% above its 2020 baseline. Its 2026 report, published in July, says total emissions rose another 25% year over year, which Microsoft attributes primarily to data centre expansion and its pause on buying unbundled renewable energy certificates. The company says that does not mean it is lowering its ambition. Six years into a ten-year sprint to carbon negative, the line is heading the wrong way.

Google's 2026 environmental report, published on 30 June, says reaching its climate moonshot "is getting harder" because its AI infrastructure buildout is "currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing". ESG Today reports that supply chain emissions rose 25% in 2025 and electricity demand rose 37%, while operational emissions fell 2%. Amazon's 2025 sustainability report confirms its absolute emissions rose too, and that it is keeping its goal of net zero by 2040.

Then there's water. Chile has spent around 15 years in what is now described as a mega drought. According to The Guardian, Google's data centre in Quilicura used around 461 million litres of water in 2024. Google has defended the figure by comparing it with a golf course. Nothing says environmental stewardship quite like benchmarking yourself against a golf course in a drought. To be fair to Google, its report says it replenished roughly 78% of the freshwater it consumed in 2025, against an ambition of 120%. That gap is the point.

And electricity. The International Energy Agency expects data centre consumption to roughly double, from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 by 2030. The UN Economic Commission for Europe has warned that data-intensive technology is growing faster than electricity infrastructure can handle. Who pays for the extra grid? In the US, the market monitor for PJM, the country's largest grid operator, attributes $6.5 billion, or 40%, of the $16.4 billion in costs from the December 2025 capacity auction to data centre load. PJM cautions that this is not the final cost to customers, and the monitor says the impact will be paid through May 2028. Capacity costs are typically recovered from electricity customers, though what any one household pays varies by state and utility. The richest companies in history get the computing power. Your nan may get the invoice.

Every time the footprint grows, out comes another efficiency initiative, another replenishment programme, another partnership with a tree-planting charity. The promise is always for later. The forest, the water and the bills, of course, are for now.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

Values that fold under pressure

Values are easy when they're cheap. Solar panels on the HQ roof, a recycling drive in the canteen, a jazzed-up report with a photo of a wind farm. Good press at a low cost.

The real test of what you value comes when keeping a promise costs you something you want. A more expensive site. A slower build. Leaving a piece of land alone. That's when we find out what a company actually believes. In Finland, the test arrived with the assessments unfinished, and the bulldozers went in anyway.

Either your values govern your decisions, including the expensive ones, or they aren't values. They're decoration. I've made this point before, and EBN has traced the same pattern in Meta's layoffs, where purpose-driven employer branding met a cost decision and the decision won.

What talent does with the evidence

Candidates don't need a sustainability analyst to read this. Deloitte's 2024 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which covered nearly 23,000 respondents in 44 countries, found that 44% of Gen Zs and 40% of millennials had rejected employers over values, with a negative environmental impact among the reasons. Some 54% of Gen Zs and 48% of millennials said they were pressuring their employers to act on climate, and 20% and 19% respectively had already changed jobs or industry because of environmental concerns. These figures come from the 2024 edition, the most recent one carrying them.

Research on psychological contract breach explains why one broken promise spreads. A meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology by Zhao and colleagues linked perceived breach to lower job satisfaction, lower organisational commitment and weaker in-role performance. People who feel misled about one thing start to re-read everything else.

A caveat is due. Surveys measure stated attitudes in broad samples, and none of this measures what happens to applications at Google, which will no doubt keep receiving plenty. The evidence does show that values-based screening is common among younger workers, and that credibility gaps carry costs inside the organisation as well as outside it.

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Now go and read the careers page

This is where it lands on the EBN doorstep. Go to any big tech careers site and you'll be invited to solve humanity's biggest challenges, build a more sustainable future and do work that matters. Plenty of brilliant people have bought that pitch. Many have joined precisely because of it. I know, because I've rolled out some of the recruitment marketing campaigns myself.

With stories like this arriving every few weeks, is it any wonder so many employer branding campaigns and careers sites struggle to land? The same talent you hope to attract also reads the news. They see the photos of the mud and they join the same dots anyone else would. If the environmental promise folds when it gets inconvenient, why would the promises on wellbeing, inclusion or "putting people first" fare any better? Why would any of them survive contact with the boardroom when a whole forest didn't?

That's the real damage. Once people catch a company out on one value, they start discounting the rest.

And the comms or employer brand team can't fix this with a campaign. As I've found myself saying a lot this year, you cannot copywrite your way out of a credibility problem created by corporate behaviour. No amount of authentic employee storytelling covers 330 hectares of mud.

What employer brand teams can do before the bulldozer arrives

Employer brand teams can't stop a bulldozer, but they can find out which promises are standing in its way. Start with a say-do audit. List every claim in the EVP and on the careers site that depends on company behaviour: sustainability, wellbeing, inclusion, "people first". Against each one, find the most recent decision that tested it, and note what the company gave up to keep its word.

Then ask who in the business can veto a decision on the strength of that claim. If nobody can, the claim is copy, and copy gets tested by news photographs sooner or later. EBN's look at Canva's restructuring found a similar gap, with careers content describing a flexibility that the restructuring then rewrote. EBN has also examined the limits of employer branding storytelling.

Where the evidence is thin, say so, evidence it or take the claim out. Brief leadership before the news cycle does it for you, and track what leavers, candidates and review sites are saying, because that feedback arrives faster than any annual survey.

For those of us in employer branding, the job is to tell the truth about an organisation and make it compelling. When the story and the behaviour part company, what's left is fiction. If sustainability is important enough to feature in your EVP, it had better be important enough to change a decision. If it isn't, take it out.

The bulldozer has spoken

Big Tech wants us to believe it's building a better future. It could start by leaving the present one standing. People aren't stupid. Top talent certainly isn't. And nobody needs a sustainability report to explain what they can see in a photograph.

The brand says one thing. The bulldozer says another. And the bulldozer is louder.

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