The Story of Carbon Dioxide is the Story of Everything: Interview with Journalist Peter Brannen

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Carbon dioxide is central to the story of Earth from its beginning more than 4 billion years ago all the way up to the present. Peter Brannen joins me to discuss his new book - The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World - an extraordinarily long-term view of the planet's past and future, and why our current path is so unprecedented.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge. And check out Patrick's new podcast The Pursuit of Dadliness! It’s all about “Dad Culture,” and Patrick will interview some fascinating guests about everything from tall wooden ships to smoked meats to comfortable sneakers to history, sports, culture, and politics. https://bit.ly/PWtPoD

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad-free right now.
0:04.6	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:12.2	Hi, everybody, from Wondery.
0:17.2	Welcome to another episode of Tides of History.
0:19.3	I'm Patrick Wyman.
0:20.3	Thanks much for joining me today.
0:22.4	Over the past five years or so, we've spent a lot of time on tides talking about the very
0:27.1	long run of human history, not just decades or centuries, but millennia, with a quick dip into
0:32.7	geological time to discuss humanity's first five million years or so.
0:37.1	But even in the broadest sense,
0:39.3	people are a pretty new introduction to this planet. The Earth has been around for much,
0:44.0	much longer than that, a few billion years longer, in fact. So how should we think about the
0:49.5	extraordinarily long term of this planet's past? Is there any way we can even wrap our heads around
0:55.4	the immense changes the Earth has undergone in several billion years? Well, today's guest has
1:01.0	some pretty compelling ideas on this topic. Peter Brannon has written for The Atlantic,
1:05.7	The New York Times, and the New Yorker, among other publications. More importantly, for our
1:09.9	purposes, he is the author of a
1:11.5	brand new book that I highly recommend to you all, entitled The Story of C.O.2 is the story of
1:17.1	everything. He has spent most of the last few years writing about the planet's history over the
1:21.7	very, very long run. His last book was The Inns of the World about the many mass extinctions
1:26.5	in Earth's history,
1:28.7	also a book you should read.
	...

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