Emily Voigt

In 1991, Norwegian novelist Jostein Gaardner published the best-seller Sophie's World, in which the title character wrestles with matters of science, history, and philosophy. Around the time she hits the Enlightenment, Sophie suffers what could be termed a mid-book crisis: how to reconcile the rise of science and reason with their darker environmental consequences, such as global warming and deforestation.

Gaarder and six scientists, activists, and journalists from Scandinavia and the United States convened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last night to reconsider Sophie's conundrum and debate what can be done about global warming. Seated alongside the novelist, as part of the PEN World Festival of International Literature's "Weather Report," was one of the world's leading climatologists, James Hansen of NASA -- who also happens to be the recipient of this year's "Sophie Prize," established by Gaarder to recognize proponents of sustainable change who are as impassioned as his fictional protégé.

To stop the greenhouse gas pollution pouring into our atmosphere, Hansen endorsed nothing short of a flat fee or tax on fossil fuels at their source: the coal mine, the oil wellhead, or the port of entry. (Last year, he said that he'd rather see the Copenhagen climate summit fail than produce an agreement based on cap-and-trade legislation, which he likens to the indulgences sold by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.)

Conversely, controversial Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, the author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, declared such a tariff unrealistic. We'll never get politicians to make fossil fuels so expensive that nobody wants to use them, he said, and besides, in his view,  cutting carbon emissions at this point represents an egregious waste of resources. The money, he has long argued, would be better spent on developing clean energy technologies for the future -- or for that matter, on more manageable crises such as HIV/AIDS or securing clean drinking water. "We need to move away from the denial of global warming," he said, "but likewise we need to move away from the ‘end of the world' story."

Lomborg was in the minority on that. The other panelists  almost uniformly characterized the stakes of global warming as an urgent matter of survival. Journalist Andrew Revkin, who has long covered climate change for The New York Times, said we need to find a way to help people overcome the hardwired gut thinking that prevents humanity from dealing rationally with long-term risks like those presented by global warming. And author/activist Bill McKibben, an OnEarth contributing editor, advocated for mobilizing grass-roots support, saying that "any solution to climate waits on a political movement large enough to force action to happen."

Cynthia Rosenzweig, co-chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, chose to focus optimistically on what we are doing, rather than what we should be doing, suggesting that you can already see change brewing in cities like New York, which are poised to be the first responders to global warming.

"There is a question that keeps arising, whether in the Western nations the political will to take large measures can be mobilized," observed the moderator Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, which co-sponsored the event along with the Fritt Ord Freedom of Expression Foundation and the Royal Norwegian Consulate General. "What kind of political changes may be required?"

Nobody spoke up in strong defense of the Obama administration, and Hansen advocated establishing a third, centrist party in America. (If he sounded a bit weary, it was perhaps because this "grandfather of climate change science," as he's been called, and the author of Storms of My Grandchildren, which addresses the threat of New Orleans-style hurricanes striking New York, London, and Tokyo, had just learned that his fourth grandchild was presently making its way into the world.)

Representing Norwegians, who sometimes call themselves "the oil sheiks of Scandinavia" because of all the oil and gas they pump out of the North Sea, clean energy activist Frederic Hauge described a moral obligation on the part of wealthy countries to partner with industry to develop clean energy technologies for poorer nations.

When McKibben noted that he had observed a high degree of cooperation among developing countries at the Copenhagen Summit -- though, alas, they aren't the ones emitting all the carbon -- Lomborg countered that those same countries would invariably prefer money to address immediate humanitarian crises than see Western nations cut their carbon emissions.

Beyond obligations and philosophy, there was also talk of numbers -- specifically, 350 parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that Hansen has said is safe if the world is to avert the worst consequences of global warming. We're already over that amount.  

"When you walk outside tonight, think to yourself, the air I'm breathing is 390 parts per million carbon dioxide -- 40 parts more than the most eminent climatologist in the world has just told us is safe," McKibben advised the audience. "It's as if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says your cholesterol is too high. ... You say, ‘Where's the pill and what do I eat now?'"

Toward the end of the evening, Gaarder took the opportunity to announce that he still believed in reason. "We have a need from nature to defend our dreams," he said, "but we have not the natural capacity to defend our dreams in three or four or five generations. That's something we have to learn."