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 isnt merely the byproduct of burning fossil fuelsit 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?

InThe Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen reveals how carbon dioxides movement through rocks, air, water, and life has kept our planets 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 todays global climate crisis and beyond, he illuminates how CO2 has been responsible for the planets many deaths and rebirths, for shaping the evolution of life, and for the development of modern human society. And he argues that its only by reckoning with this deep planetary history that we can understand the cosmic stakes of our current moment on Earthand how dangerous our experiment with the climate really is.

With groundbreaking research and a clear-eyed perspective, Brannen shows how a deep exploration of the carbon cycle across our planets history 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.