The Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF) has already done what most convenings only promise: stepped out of the commentary loop and into capability. Six domains now stand like beams: Arctic fragility, derailment risk, financial distortion, frontline equity, governance, and the insufficiency of warnings. To act in advance of hindsight is already prevention. That alone sets them apart.
But step back and another shape comes into view. The unspoken seventh domain: industrial lock-in.
This is not ice or clouds. It is the concrete poured yesterday and the debt contracts signed last week. Every coal plant and pipeline is a man-made tipping point with a warranty longer than the politicians who approved it. Once built, it creates its own gravity, and suddenly “phasing out” looks suspiciously like “servicing debt until 2050.”
Lock-in is the silent saboteur. It makes early warnings feel like polite memos no one acts on. It multiplies derailment by hard-wiring brittleness into whole societies. It bends finance into a comedy of stranded assets that markets prefer not to notice until the lawsuits arrive. It ensures frontline communities pay twice, once in pollution and again in abandonment. And it forces governance into the role of reluctant landlord to infrastructure it can neither afford to maintain nor easily dismantle.
To name this seventh domain is not to correct the six, it is to finish the sentence. It reframes the risk: not only the thresholds of nature but the thresholds of our own construction. What is made can be unmade. And yes, unmaking is always messier than the ribbon-cutting, but it is still possible.
CEF has already lit the ground with six beams. Adding the seventh strengthens the lattice, making the coalition even more prepared for the nonlinear future that is not waiting politely at the door but pressing in already.
The Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF) has already done what most convenings only promise: stepped out of the commentary loop and into capability. Six domains now stand like beams: Arctic fragility, derailment risk, financial distortion, frontline equity, governance, and the insufficiency of warnings. To act in advance of hindsight is already prevention. That alone sets them apart.
But step back and another shape comes into view. The unspoken seventh domain: industrial lock-in.
This is not ice or clouds. It is the concrete poured yesterday and the debt contracts signed last week. Every coal plant and pipeline is a man-made tipping point with a warranty longer than the politicians who approved it. Once built, it creates its own gravity, and suddenly “phasing out” looks suspiciously like “servicing debt until 2050.”
Lock-in is the silent saboteur. It makes early warnings feel like polite memos no one acts on. It multiplies derailment by hard-wiring brittleness into whole societies. It bends finance into a comedy of stranded assets that markets prefer not to notice until the lawsuits arrive. It ensures frontline communities pay twice, once in pollution and again in abandonment. And it forces governance into the role of reluctant landlord to infrastructure it can neither afford to maintain nor easily dismantle.
To name this seventh domain is not to correct the six, it is to finish the sentence. It reframes the risk: not only the thresholds of nature but the thresholds of our own construction. What is made can be unmade. And yes, unmaking is always messier than the ribbon-cutting, but it is still possible.
CEF has already lit the ground with six beams. Adding the seventh strengthens the lattice, making the coalition even more prepared for the nonlinear future that is not waiting politely at the door but pressing in already.