Author Talk–"The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World" by Peter Brannen

The Vineyard Haven Library is pleased to welcome award-winning science journalist and author Peter Brannen for a conversation about his latest book, “The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World.” This event will be held at 6:00 PM on Tuesday, October 7th at the Katharine Cornell Theatre, located at 51 Spring Street in Vineyard Haven (above Tisbury Town Hall). Free and open to the public. No registration required.

Book synopsis:

Every year, we are dangerously warping the climate by putting gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. But CO2 isn’t merely the byproduct 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?

“The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything” explores 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 deep planetary history that we can understand the cosmic stakes of our current moment on Earth—and 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 planet’s 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.

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Aeon, The Boston Globe, Slate and The Guardian among other publications. His book, “The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything,” was published August 26, 2025 by Ecco. His previous book, “The Ends of the World,” about the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history, was published in 2017 by Ecco. 

Peter was a 2023 visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and is an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He was formerly a 2018 Scripps Fellow at CU-Boulder, a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke University, and a 2011 Ocean Science Journalism Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, MA. His essays have been featured in the “Best American Science and Nature Writing” series and in “The Climate Book” by Greta Thunberg. Peter worked for the Vineyard Gazette from 2009-2012.

For more information, please contact the library at vhpl_programs@clamsnet.org or (508) 696-4211.