Hopelessness and determination

“THE test of a first-rate intelligence”, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a sometime Parisian, once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.” By this standard, the 195 countries that gathered outside Paris in the two weeks running up to December 12th to negotiate a new agreement on climate change have to be counted very bright indeed. It is vital, they declared, that the world’s temperature does not climb much more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels; and yet they simultaneously celebrated a new climate agreement that got nowhere close to preventing such a rise.