"Ambitious absorbing… Brannen is an effusive maximalist writer a mind vividly alive on the
page… and his arguments like his writing are hugely compelling."— The New York Times Book
Review How carbon dioxide made planet Earth shaped human history and now holds our future
in the balance Every year we are dangerously warping the climate by putting gigantic amounts
of carbon dioxide into the air. But CO2 isn’t merely the by-product of burning fossil fuels—it
is also fundamental to how our planet works. All life is ultimately made from CO2 and it has
kept Earth bizarrely habitable for hundreds of millions of years. In short it is the most
important substance on Earth. But how is it that CO2 is as essential to life on Earth as it is
capable of destroying it? In The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything award- winning
science journalist Peter Brannen reveals how carbon dioxide’s movement through rocks air
water and life has kept our planet’s climate livable its air breathable and its oceans
hospitable to complex life. Starting at the dawn of life almost 4 billion years ago and
working all the way up through today’s global climate crisis and beyond he illuminates how CO2
has been responsible for the planet’s many deaths and rebirths for shaping the evolution of
life and for the development of modern human society. And he argues that it’s only by
reckoning with this planetary-scale history that we can understand the cosmic stakes of our
current moment on Earth—and how dangerous our experiment with the climate really is. Drawing on
groundbreaking research and with a clear- eyed perspective Brannen shows how a deep
exploration of the carbon cycle can shed light on the way forward for humanity as we try to
avert environmental catastrophe in the future. And it all begins with a richer understanding of
the critical role of CO2 in our world.
