THE STORY OF CO2 IS THE STORY OF EVERYTHING

The “very stuff of life.”

Carbon dioxide and its energy, says journalist Brannen, author of The Ends of the World, have lifted living standards, unleashed new food supplies, lengthened lifespans, and spread literacy worldwide. “Today, as in the beginning, life is still made out of carbon dioxide,” Brannen writes. “And the world’s problems are made out of carbon dioxide as well.” The natural forces that have driven the global carbon cycle for millions of years are now out of whack, governed no longer by volcanism but by economic and geopolitical systems. Today, hundreds of millions of years’ worth of energy has been unleashed in a “geological nanosecond.” As he walks the floor of Death Valley amid stones that are 120 times older than the Grand Canyon—“a half-billion years [before] the first dinosaur evolved”—the author confronts the fact that all geologists face: “Time is big.” He envisions ice four miles thick in places and sea level dropping a mile. What followed was the most extreme of climate catastrophes, much of the chaos still left written in Death Valley. And then, “All hell broke loose, and when it ended—for some reason—the riot of animal life exploded.” Eventually, Brannen brings us to “our millisecond tenure on this planet,” where we lounge in a time of “extremely misleading stability.” Don’t get comfortable—this golden age is coming to an end, which pushes us to the urgency to get off fossil fuel use at a time when “we’re still going to need lots of energy.” But the market cares little about the planet. “In summary,” writes Brannen, “we’re in deep shit.” This book, though, isn’t a rant against modernization. It’s a rich geological history and an overdue examination of the costs and benefits of what humans have built with our extravagant use of a chemical compound.

A thrilling exploration of Earth’s tumultuous history, its tenuous present, and a future in grave doubt.