The United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) will someday be regarded as the spire placed atop a towering edifice of mendacity and hubris. It will momentarily reward the vanity of those who built it, but it will seem as out of place with the time and events that followed as the newly constructed Empire State Building must have seemed to New Yorkers during the depths of the Great Depression. While the aspirational quality of the Empire State Building was incongruous with the bleak Depression, at least that building contributed, and continues to contribute, to human well being, and its soaring lines remains aspirational. The figurative UNCCC tower is like the Dark Tower in Lord of the Rings, an obsidian monument to the nether regions of the human soul, erected on a foundation that will eventually crumble.

It is ironic that the UNCCC is being held in Paris, a font of European civilization, a little over two weeks after terrorists plunged the city into chaos and bloodshed. Participants will congratulate themselves for—among many self-evident virtues—their intrepid refusal to submit to fear, neither canceling nor moving the conference, thus denying terrorism a symbolic victory. Only a curmudgeon would point out the incongruity: a gathering of egos and powers who believe they can control the world and its climate contrasted to the recent carnage, yet another demonstration of their impotence.

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