We Paid for the Summer. We Have Not Paid for the Winter.

The cool mornings have arrived, and with them a temptation the century can no longer afford: to mistake a reprieve for a resolution. The summer that watered past 124 million people ran, as the Concordat now admits, on credit — and the instinct of a cooling world is to file the invoice under last season. That instinct is how we arrived here, one deferred bill at a time. The leased reactors at the corridor camps have no winter contracts. The desalination shock is still walking down the ledger toward the bread in Lagos. The rights-floor idea moving through corridor legislatures will die quietly the moment the temperate world stops feeling afraid. I do not argue that we did too little this summer; we did a great deal, and it held. I argue that we keep confusing the end of the heat with the end of the obligation. The planet gave us a colder month. It did not send a receipt marked paid.