Here's one of the slightly-under-the-radar stories at Copenhagen: The Wall Street Journal has a piece about how any eventual climate agreement will likely include a modest tax on "bunker fuel," the low-grade oil that ships use for fuel. Much like airlines, the shipping industry was exempt from the original Kyoto Protocol, but since shipping now accounts for 3 percent to 5 percent of the world's carbon emissions, that won't last.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

By Christopher Caldwell

(Doubleday, 422 pp., $30)

As its subtitle makes clear, this is a book about immigration, Islam, and the West. But at the same time this is also a book about a particular moral culture, a set of attitudes, habits, and beliefs that has developed in Western Europe over the past sixty years. There isn’t a good shorthand way to describe this moral culture. Sometimes it is called “political correctness,” though politics as such does not define it. Sometimes it is called “the culture of tolerance,” though at times it is not tolerant at all. Christopher Caldwell mostly winds up calling it the “European project,” which is not bad, since it implies that it is something that Europe is still building, an ongoing but incomplete enterprise, a “project” for the future.