The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything

How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World

By: Peter Brannen

Narrated by: Adam Verner

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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Excellent content but terrible audio

This book is an excellent history of the carbon cycle on earth, but the audio sounds like it was recorded using a tin can telephone inside a coal mine. And the reader’s monotone doesn’t help. Honestly, if the production is going to be this bad, just use an AI voice model.

As devastating as it is profound

Brannen spares no punches as he takes you to atmospheric level and guides you through the history of CO2, our planet, and our species. It’s a timely book that shows bare the ugliness of the catch 22 that is modernity and what meager options we have in front of us.

woah

What Brannen does in this book is a near mythic feat of strength: condensing and describing planetary geology so that someone without a science background (like me) can finally understand *why* humanity's unrelenting incineration of CO2 is so terrifying. Because of ecological devastation and exponential social injustice, I understood *that* burning fossil fuels was dangerous and destructive, but, before this book, I had no idea what that really meant for the planet. And, frankly, I didn't believe that a species as miniscule as ours, in the context of Big Time, could be responsible for something like a global mass extinction event. It turns out we can! And are! Yikes! But, dont let that scare you off. The book tries to keep our collective chins up by concluding that if *we* got us into this mess, maybe we can get us out of it. And the perspective and foundational geologic context are too important to pass up. I've listened to it multiple times, and will continue to do so, since the ideas are so big and paradigm-shifting that I want to be sure I understand what's being said. It's a credit to the work that - despite the grimmest of subject matter - I am still hungry to revisit the material, and feel intellectually richer for having done so.
I did struggle with the narration, however. The reader's over-pronunciation of every syllable felt continuously bizarre. He also seemed thrown every time there was a "though" in the text, (e.g. "It would seem, though, this is not the case.") which had me wondering if it was an AI voice at first. I was sold on the reader's humanity eventually because every once in a while the shock of a particular stat or historical event could be heard in his voice, as if his mind was being delicately blown by the force and scale of the information, so capably expressed. Mine sure was. And is. Woah.

Excessive metaphor & narrator is ridiculous with breathless drama

The subject matter of this book is extremely important for current audiences, and the review of Paleo climatology is fascinating however it is almost impossible to listen to this book because of the bizarre narrator and the excessive use of flowery metaphor by the author. This is so bad that I simply cannot recommend this book.