Brannen is clear-eyed about the bounty of modernity. He acknowledges what fossil fuels \u2014 unlocking all that carbon \u2014 have made possible: rising living standards and longer lives, literacy and leisure, even taller bodies. The breakthrough of the 17th century \u2014 the harnessing of steam power \u2014 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. <\/p>\n
Brannen admires humanity\u2019s chutzpah, but warns against overdoing the awe. The problem with our fossil-fuel binge is twofold. First, we\u2019re burning through the buried energy of half a billion years\u2019 worth of ancient forests in mere fiscal quarters \u2014 much too quickly. Second, climate change. For CO\u2082 is not just life\u2019s carbon source but also Earth\u2019s thermostat. High CO\u2082, typically occasioned by volcanic activity, has meant sweltering poles; low CO\u2082 may cause ice ages. Humans, not volcanoes, are driving the spike in temperature these days. <\/p>\n
Brannen\u2019s book isn\u2019t merely about contemporary climate change \u2014 as his clunky but apposite title has it, The Story of CO\u2082 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 \u201cstuck in second gear\u201d and in terms of animal life nothing much happened. <\/p>\n
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High CO\u2082 from volcanic activity has meant sweltering poles; low CO\u2082 may cause ice ages<\/p>\n
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Then \u201cthe CO\u2082 thermostat that keeps our world habitable \u2026 failed catastrophically. [And] the world was apocalyptically baptised in ice, then fire \u2026 then ice, then fire again.\u201d Snowball Earth was when our planet turned into an \u201cicy tomb\u201d until volcanic CO\u2082 thawed it. The result was the Cambrian Explosion of bizarre fauna. This paved the way for more sophisticated life in the Carboniferous: \u201cdragonflies the size of seagulls, scorpions the size of golden retrievers, millipedes the size of alligators\u201d.<\/p>\n
Our present Quaternary, which began 2.58 million years ago, is a frigid age. Humans are \u201cice-age creatures\u201d moulded by low CO\u2082. As Brannen puts it: \u201cIt took tens of millions of years to get from the sauna of the age of dinosaurs to our own modern low-CO\u2082 world and humans, along with the rest of life on Earth today, are evolved and adapted for our icehouse planet, not the ancient high-CO\u2082 greenhouse climate into which industrial civilisation is potentially launching us all in the next few decades.\u201d For most of Earth\u2019s history there\u2019s been no permanent ice; Antarctica iced over only 33 million years ago. Today\u2019s \u201cinterglacial\u201d Holocene (the past 11,700 years) has been unusually stable \u2014 perfect for complex societies.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Discovery of 11,000-year-old tools on Skye sheds light on early humans<\/a><\/p>\n 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 \u201ccomically undersized\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Brannen hopes humanity can keep life \u201cflickering awhile longer\u201d, but avoids grand predictions<\/p>\n RICARDO BELIEL\/BRAZIL PHOTOS\/LIGHTROCKET\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n 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\u2019 War that ended one in three central European lives. Capitalism, Brannen argues, was another inadvertent upshot. \u201cIn 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.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n \u2022 What we\u2019re reading this week \u2014 by the Times books team<\/a><\/p>\n In England, as the Little Ice Age cut into agricultural yields, landowners squeezed for cash pushed to dismantle the \u201choary feudal agricultural system\u201d 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. \u201cWealth accumulates, but men decay,\u201d the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith observed of the new capitalist regime. It was precisely this capital accumulation that powered the fossil-fuel economy. <\/p>\n Fossil fuels lined the pockets of the Rockefellers and Carnegies while miners, slaves and prisoners paid the price. We\u2019re still living with the legacy of coal. Even today, the Labour vote maps uncannily onto Britain\u2019s Carboniferous-age coal seams. In 1912, Churchill ordered the Royal Navy\u2019s conversion from coal to oil, setting in motion a broader western shift. Thus began a century\u2019s unhealthy fixation with shoring up the petro-dictatorships of the Middle East.<\/p>\n The most ruinous consequence of fossil fuels is, of course, climate change. The American scientist Eunice Foote<\/a> 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 \u201cflickering awhile longer\u201d, 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: \u201cIn summary, we\u2019re in deep shit.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Amazon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\/25ec0ca0-04b4-4529-91d6-e2ab6f087685.jpg\")
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