The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World – A Natural History of Climate and the Future of Life Hardcover – August 26, 2025

"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 balanceEvery 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 this single molecule shaped 4 billion years of life, climate, and civilization?The Carbon Cycle: Follow CO2 on its epic journey through rocks, air, oceans, and life—the planetary thermostat that has kept Earth habitable for eons, and which we are now breaking.The Origin of Life: Discover how the fundamental chemistry of life itself emerged to solve a planetary problem, transforming CO2 into living matter at the bottom of a primordial ocean.Climate Change in Deep Time: Journey through Snowball Earths and hothouse worlds to see how CO2 has repeatedly made and unmade the planet, providing a crucial, and cautionary, guide for our own future.The Industrial Revolution: Uncover how humanity tapped into a half-billion-year-old planetary battery of fossil fuels, unleashing a new metabolism that transformed civilization and set us on a collision course with geologic history. Read more