The U.N. Climate Conference has left behind a terrible stench. But it doesn’t come from the 400 jets that flew world leaders to that exercise in retributive multilateral egalitarianism last weekend. Carbon dioxide is an odorless gas, so even though do-gooding pols pumped thousands of tons of it into the atmosphere, the rank smell they left in their wake is not a physical one perceived by the olfactory senses.

The miasma rising into the sunny winter skies over Egypt’s luxe resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, and which is now spreading around the globe, is the noisome odor of willful unseriousness, humbug, and hypocrisy.

The conference decided that the world’s successful nations should pay hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions, to unsuccessful ones to compensate for supposed harm done to them by industrialization. A portion of the outrage is that China, the world’s biggest polluter and second-largest economy, may be allowed to wriggle out of making payments because it is “developing” — aren’t we all? — and might even get some of the loot.

Even that is not the worst of it. What is most grating is the disingenuousness that made the deal possible and which is the lubricant of most such multilateral agreements, especially those purporting to deal with the nonemergency of climate change.