If joyless geologists and geochemists are to be believed, hydrogenated carbon dioxide is all there is to life. It is everywhere. “The spice in peppers; the caffeine in coffee; the booze in your cocktail; your eyeballs; the petals of a bougainvillea,” the science journalist Peter Brannen writes, adding “the scum on your bathtub; the mane of a lion — all are organic carbon, ultimately made from CO₂.”
Humans are just a knotty arrangement of Cs, Hs and Os. “Simply put, life is organic carbon [and] 98 percent of the atoms in your body are C, H, and O.” Like life, death can be viewed unsentimentally as a slow unspooling into water and carbon dioxide. So no, pedantically speaking, to dust we shall not return.
Brannen starts The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything: A Planetary Experiment 315 million years ago in the Carboniferous period, describing a Lepidodendron tree collapsing into the black swamp beneath it. “And there it rested, buried in the mire, commended to the Earth for the ages,” he writes, its carbon locked away in the Earth’s crust, eventually becoming coal. Then he imagines a member of Homo sapiens, driving an excavator, digging it out. “After 315 million years, the venerable tree — this unlikely emissary from deep time — was finally metabolised in a coal-fired power plant with the rest of its forgotten forest.”
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Brannen is clear-eyed about the bounty of modernity. He acknowledges what fossil fuels — unlocking all that carbon — have made possible: rising living standards and longer lives, literacy and leisure, even taller bodies. The breakthrough of the 17th century — the harnessing of steam power — freed us from muscle power. Thanks to tractors and trucks and suchlike, eight billion people are able to do the work that would have required 500 billion pre-industrial labourers. So happily absent from these pages is the usual kneejerk lament about paving paradise to put up a parking lot.
Brannen admires humanity’s chutzpah, but warns against overdoing the awe. The problem with our fossil-fuel binge is twofold. First, we’re burning through the buried energy of half a billion years’ worth of ancient forests in mere fiscal quarters — much too quickly. Second, climate change. For CO₂ is not just life’s carbon source but also Earth’s thermostat. High CO₂, typically occasioned by volcanic activity, has meant sweltering poles; low CO₂ may cause ice ages. Humans, not volcanoes, are driving the spike in temperature these days.
Brannen’s book isn’t merely about contemporary climate change — as his clunky but apposite title has it, The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything. He has a gift for translating recondite scientific facts into gorgeous psychedelic passages that verge on pure poetry. This is history on a heroic scale. We learn about the so-called Boring Billion, between 1.8 billion to 850 million years ago, when Earth was “stuck in second gear” and in terms of animal life nothing much happened.
High CO₂ from volcanic activity has meant sweltering poles; low CO₂ may cause ice ages
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Then “the CO₂ thermostat that keeps our world habitable … failed catastrophically. [And] the world was apocalyptically baptised in ice, then fire … then ice, then fire again.” Snowball Earth was when our planet turned into an “icy tomb” until volcanic CO₂ thawed it. The result was the Cambrian Explosion of bizarre fauna. This paved the way for more sophisticated life in the Carboniferous: “dragonflies the size of seagulls, scorpions the size of golden retrievers, millipedes the size of alligators”.
Our present Quaternary, which began 2.58 million years ago, is a frigid age. Humans are “ice-age creatures” moulded by low CO₂. As Brannen puts it: “It took tens of millions of years to get from the sauna of the age of dinosaurs to our own modern low-CO₂ world and humans, along with the rest of life on Earth today, are evolved and adapted for our icehouse planet, not the ancient high-CO₂ greenhouse climate into which industrial civilisation is potentially launching us all in the next few decades.” For most of Earth’s history there’s been no permanent ice; Antarctica iced over only 33 million years ago. Today’s “interglacial” Holocene (the past 11,700 years) has been unusually stable — perfect for complex societies.
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Our pyrophilia also helped us. Our genius as a species lies in our ability to tame fire for cooking, a skill that has enabled the calorie-dense diets our energy-hogging brains demand. By outsourcing the hard work of digestion to flame, we have evolved “comically undersized” molars and stomachs, freeing up precious energy for thought. Compared with other primates, whose brains consume roughly a tenth of their resting metabolism, we are consummate eggheads: our brains claim a quarter.
Brannen hopes humanity can keep life “flickering awhile longer”, but avoids grand predictions
RICARDO BELIEL/BRAZIL PHOTOS/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES
All that thinking has allowed us to battle climate change, if not always successfully. When tropical volcanoes dimmed the sun in the 17th century, the Little Ice Age gripped Europe; harvests failed and famine spread, fuelling the fanaticism of the Thirty Years’ War that ended one in three central European lives. Capitalism, Brannen argues, was another inadvertent upshot. “In northern Europe, where grain farmers already found themselves on the edge, the cold pushed society into the wider world to instead buy grain on the international market.” The maritime Dutch looked abroad to the Baltic for grain, becoming the grain suppliers to much of a hunger-racked Europe. Importing this cheap grain freed much of its population from farm work, Dutch towns boomed. Prosperous merchants pioneered joint-stock companies.
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In England, as the Little Ice Age cut into agricultural yields, landowners squeezed for cash pushed to dismantle the “hoary feudal agricultural system” that granted peasants customary rights to graze and farm on common lands. Enclosure, which allowed landowners to build surpluses, ushered the peasantry into an unforgiving world of rent and profit, productivity and technology. “Wealth accumulates, but men decay,” the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith observed of the new capitalist regime. It was precisely this capital accumulation that powered the fossil-fuel economy.
Fossil fuels lined the pockets of the Rockefellers and Carnegies while miners, slaves and prisoners paid the price. We’re still living with the legacy of coal. Even today, the Labour vote maps uncannily onto Britain’s Carboniferous-age coal seams. In 1912, Churchill ordered the Royal Navy’s conversion from coal to oil, setting in motion a broader western shift. Thus began a century’s unhealthy fixation with shoring up the petro-dictatorships of the Middle East.
The most ruinous consequence of fossil fuels is, of course, climate change. The American scientist Eunice Foote was the first to identify it, in 1856, and the Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko made the first accurate climate model, in 1972. But there are no quick fixes to global warming, Brannen concludes. He dismisses mad Silicon Valley moonshots like carbon capture, with its price tag of $22 trillion for 0.1C cooling. Degrowth likewise is politically implausible, he observes. Still, the fact is that infinite energy-driven growth is physically impossible. Brannen hopes humanity can keep life “flickering awhile longer”, but avoids grand predictions. This is to his credit. Historians ought not to cosplay as clairvoyants. He closes his book with a touch of American vernacular: “In summary, we’re in deep shit.”
The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything: A Planetary Experiment by Peter Brannen (Allen Lane £30 pp512). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members