The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything

Urgent and astounding … Brannen weaves together the entire history of Earth, and the origins and tribulations of life over billions of years, with the predicament we find ourselves in today … Brannen is in a class of his own – Steve Brusatte * Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs *As with everything Peter Brannen writes, this is fascinating; deep history brought vividly to life. But it’s also crucial–our ability to understand and act on it will determine how the next period in earth’s history unfolds – Bill McKibben * author Here Comes the Sun *A moving and magisterial tribute to the magic-seeming chemical interplay of air and rock, plant kingdom and ocean expanse, which scientists dryly call the ‘carbon cycle.’ Upon it, Brannen shows, absolutely all life rests—with growing, and unnerving, precarity – David Wallace-Wells * New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth *A completely new vision of Earth and human history that will change your perspective forever – Rebecca Boyle * author of Our Moon *What a brilliant and epic book this is! I study this stuff for a living and still learned so much—how coal nearly froze the planet, why the rocks beneath our feet allow us to breathe, and the origins of our modern industrial world – Kate Marvel * author of Human Nature *A grand tour of billions of years of history … Brannen elegantly moves through the Earth’s epochs * Daily Mail *

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and contributing writer at the Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, and the Guardian, among other publications. His first book, The Ends of the World, was published in 2017. Peter was a 2024 visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and is an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder.