I want to add a meta-commentary to this post from our Environment Minister Maria, which I find essential that everyone understands.
Especially those who, like Maria, wish to position themselves as stewards of Power in government and ministries.
Because something has happened to the very foundation of speaking to a nation that - apparently - has not yet dawned on those who do it.
And you can follow that change, and the direction that movement has, quite easily here.
Let me explain.
A minister writes a post about the summer's forest fires. Shortly after, a statistician responds. Not with an opinion, but with a series of links. To the EU's own monitoring system, the very data source the minister's own administration leans on (link in first comment).
It hasn't always been like this.
For most of Human history, the description of reality was a privilege that came with position. The king described the realm, the church described heaven, and later the minister described society from a podium where no one in the hall had access to the numbers the description rested on. You could disagree with the conclusion, but you could not verify the premise.
Power spoke, and the people listened, because the people had no other choice.
That condition is gone.
Not gradually, but fundamentally.
Gone.
I have written about this repeatedly over the last four to five years, because I have been able to see it coming. So has everyone who understood the technological advances and the consequences of the leading frontier models of artificial intelligence. Because they now mean, not just that we have access to the world's best data, from the world's best institutions, and that the world's most advanced reports on the planet's condition lie in the pocket of anyone who bothers to pull them out.
It means they are becoming more detailed, more coherent and easier to understand for every month that passes, because machines can now read them for us, translate them, hold them up against each other and find the place where claim and data part ways.
That movement only goes one way, and it is accelerating.
With a force no one can grasp.
But within the next few years it will apply to EVERY subject, EVERY number, EVERY claim made publicly.
And there will be NOWHERE to hide.
And here something arises that the top of our society has not quite understood yet. I think.
In the old world it was enough to serve your agenda. You could choose the examples that confirmed the narrative and leave the rest, because who would discover it? Ideological observance was a working method, not a risk. What you said and what the data showed could live in separate worlds, because only one of them was public.
Now both are public. And easily transparent.
And then the job itself changes.
A position at the top no longer gives control over the description of reality. It only gives one thing back - RESPONSIBILITY for the description holding up.
Truth-responsibility.
Not as moral luxury, but as the new basic condition of office.
Gone is the time when feelings, intuitions and hunches could dress up as facts - and where hot air could serve as an answer.
Because notice what is actually at stake in such an exchange here. The climate is not at stake. Both parties in this case acknowledge that the climate is a real problem - they simply disagree about the size of the problem, and about in what order it should be solved in relation to everything else.
What is at stake is something more costly -
Trust.
And trust has a merciless logic. A right cause carried by a skewed argument loses more than it wins, because the moment the citizen can check for themselves and finds a distance between what was said and what was measured, the doubt does not only infect the argument. It infects the cause. It infects the position. It infects, at last, the very institution that spoke.
That is the bill no one talks about.
Every time an authority stretches reality to serve an agenda, even a good agenda, especially a good agenda, it draws on an account that is not refilled by good intentions. And in a time where EVERYTHING can be verified - and I repeat, soon this will apply to EVERY subject - that account is being emptied faster than ever before.
One can mourn the new transparency or welcome it. That is secondary. It does not ask for permission. But it places one new demand on anyone speaking to a nation - to speak as if everyone can check it.
Because they can.
The position no longer gives the right to describe reality.
It ONLY gives responsibility for it.
❤️🔥🪽
And in addition.
Every political party ought to hold long, deep group meetings about what this shift will mean for their politics and for the way it is communicated.
Not as crisis management, but as preparation.
Because the parties who understand this first will gain an advantage the others cannot catch up with through communication.
...
(I will not be answering comments about the climate - since this post is not about that. We can - and we will continue to - take that in separate posts.)
