Thu Sep 18, 02025, 11:00PM UTC
Phoebe Cohen and Peter Brannen
The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything
Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, and Long Now Boston welcome Peter Brannen for a discussion of his new book. He will be joined in conversation by Phoebe Cohen—paleontologist, science communicator, and Professor of Geosciences at Williams College.
Event summary coming soon!
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 isn’t merely the by-product 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?
In The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen reveals 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 planetary-scale history that we can understand the cosmic stakes of our current moment on Earth—and how dangerous our experiment with the climate really is.
Phoebe Cohen is Professor of Geosciences at Williams College in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Phoebe is a paleontologist, teacher, and science communicator. Her research focuses on understanding the interactions between life and the earth system in deep time by integrating micropaleontological, geological, and biological lines of evidence. In short, she studies ancient tiny fossils to figure out how and why our world got to be the way it is today. Phoebe's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. She is also the co-host of the forthcoming podcast Jax and Phoebe Make a Planet, and an advocate for inclusion and equity in the earth sciences and beyond.
Phoebe Cohen
Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Aeon, The Boston Globe, Slate and The Guardian among other publications. 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 Brannen
