The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything

"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.

How has a single substance dictated our planet's fate for billions of years, and what does its deep history tell us about our own survival?

• The Planetary Thermostat: Follow the epic journey of carbon through rocks, air, water, and life, and learn how this delicate cycle has kept Earth habitable for eons?and why our interference is so dangerous.
• A 4-Billion-Year Biography: Travel from the dawn of life through Snowball Earth and the age of dinosaurs to see how CO2 has repeatedly remade the world, driving both creation and catastrophe.
• The Rise of a New Metabolism: Uncover how the Industrial Revolution began a radical new experiment, unleashing hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight from fossil fuels and reshaping the planet in centuries.
• Lessons from Paleoclimatology: See how groundbreaking research into Earth's past climates provides a crucial, and alarming, roadmap for understanding the consequences of our current moment.