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I think the 200 number would be .. including the offshore and big city lawyers\finacial engineers to ensure no laws are followed and no tax is ever paid.

A little thread drift, but an associate member of the EU hasn't been defined, so knowing the EU it may take a very long time, although the desire to move away from the USA may speed things up a little. But there will be hurdles. There are three freedoms that are preserved across the EU: movement of capital, movement of goods/services, and movement of people. Will these have to be included in an associate membership? If so, then your control of immigration from any EU country goes out the window. So, given Australia's very tight grip on immigration compared to other countries, the preservation of this free movement may well be a problem. The EU will need to think about things very carefully. There sort of is already associate membership - it is the European Economic Area. It allows Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein to basically be in the EU without being in the EU, and they are required to comply with most of the obligations of the EU. Yet they don't get to vote on the EU rules they need to comply with. Switzerland has a similar arrangement through a bilateral agreement. And of course, after the messy divorce, there is this country called Britain, which tried it's own bilateral deal, but all was offered was Switzerland's deal. So, the EU has some existing memberships and deals, that if they give special treatment to Canada in this Associate Membership status, might peeve off a couple of these others, and may trigger a whole round of renegotiations of these arrangements. And given the rising anti-EU sentiment within the EU and the rising right, if Canada gets some sort of cushy deal, well, there will be individual countries coming under pressure to leave the EU and join a cushy deal, too. Outside of a free trade agreement or similar type of bilateral arrangement, I can't see this one being negotiated and agreed upon anytime soon. These are not insurmountable problems, but the political risk for the EU is very much there.

Not the only cynic:

Also, I have seen each new well burns off waste gas until they get gas clean enough to process. This can take up to a month, producing lots of CO2. It's only the final use of the gas that looks good - as long as nobody counts all the methane and CO2 lost before the gas gets to a user.

Anyone who cares about the environment wants to STOP the building of data centres, so I'm not sure where you get your information.

Well the Pacific Ocean has had a historic quiet winter - regarding hurricanes. However there is now a very big patch of warm water making it's way across toward us. We'll see what that does to our weather. Meanwhile, at last there has been some improvement in tracking methane plumes coming from the 'natural' gas industry. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, trapping around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide and has been ignored for too long. Burning gas might produce less CO2 but there is lots of methane escaping into the atmosphere before the gas gets burned. No wonder the place is warming up. Blaming cow farts looks like a convenient diversion from the gas industry. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/14/us-companies-methane-pollution-rankings