Peter Brannen started investigating the history of carbon dioxide, but ended up uncovering the story of everything.
Award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen, BC ’06, published his most recent book, The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything, this August. In it, Brannen delves into the role of carbon dioxide in our planet’s systems from the beginning of time to today’s climate crisis, examining how this chemical compound connects the distant past to an uncertain future.
“[Carbon dioxide] really is fundamental to how the planet operates,” Brannen said.
After graduating from Boston College with an English degree, Brannen wrote for various publications, including The Atlantic and The New York Times. Over time, he developed a passion for writing about science-related subjects, starting with stories about Earth’s oceans.
“I tried in my spare time taking on these ocean science stories about overfishing, climate change, ocean acidification, and coastal pollution,” Brannen said. “And I loved writing about that.”
At an ocean science journalism conference, everything changed for Brannen. There, he spoke with a scientist who studies the drilling of 56-million-year-old sediment cores on the ocean floor to better understand current and future carbon dioxide emissions.
“That was a revelation for me—climate change is often talked about as this thing that’s in the future, and it’s theoretical and on computer models,” Brannen said. “For me, it was just sort of mind-blowing that there is this record in the rocks, and that if you know how to interpret them, you can learn a lot about how our planet is going to respond.”
This revelation—that data from the past can inform us about our planet’s future—inspired Brannen to start writing environmental and scientific books. In 2017, he published The Ends of the World, which covers Earth’s five major mass extinctions.
But publishing his first book didn’t happen overnight—it involved years of research.
“I basically hung out with paleontologists and geologists for a few years who were going on field work and doing stuff in the lab and trying to piece together the evidence and clues and figure out what happened at the biggest mass extinctions in Earth’s history,” Brannen said.
By combining meticulous scientific research with his skills as a writer, Brannen was able to translate complex scientific concepts into a captivating story, said Rebecca Boyle, a fellow author and science journalist who has been a friend and colleague of Brannen’s for years.
“There’s a reason why scientists are not writers all the time,” Boyle said. “You need a poet to help you. You need someone like Peter to translate the rocks into something profound.”
The common perception of carbon dioxide focuses on its negative implications, but while writing The Ends of the World, Brannen discovered that there is a much bigger story to the chemical compound than most people understand.
Uncovering more about the carbon cycle, which moves carbon throughout the Earth and atmosphere and is a vital process for life, inspired Brannen to start writing his second book: The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything.
“[The carbon cycle] is what keeps planet Earth habitable and inhabited by life,” Brannen said. “So that was my motivation. Just to sort of step back from the headlines and reintroduce people to the thing that they, you know, think they know about from the news.”
Brannen obtained a book deal in 2020 and spent years working with scientists and doing in-depth research, building off much of the knowledge he gained while writing The Ends of the World.
“I was just downloading and devouring every academic paper I could get my hands on that was relevant to the new book,” Brannen said.
During this time, Brannen was living in Boulder, Colo., as a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
There, he spent time collaborating with many scientists in the geoscience department.
“I became like a barnacle on the geoscience department there, where I had this nice community where they’d let me sit in on meetings,” Brannen said.
Carl Simpson, an associate professor of geological sciences at CU Boulder, attested to Brannen’s role in the geoscience community at the University, which he said is not typical of those without a formal background in science.
“He shows up to our scientific meetings almost all the time, and when he’s not there, everybody misses him,” Simpson said. “So he’s really become part of the paleobiology geology community in a serious way. There’s not that many people from other professions that do that.”
After years of in-depth research, Brannen completed The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything, which was published in August of 2025.
“It took about four or five years to pull this thing off, which was a lot longer than I thought it was going to take because the scope and the length of the book just spiraled out of control,” Brannen said. “When you start pulling on this thread of CO₂, the book’s title is pretty literal. I ended up talking about everything.”
Simpson noted the skill it takes to thoroughly research such a complex topic and then accurately convey this research into a readable, interesting story.
“His magic touch is being able to write about things that are so difficult to think about because of their time scale or sort of alienness of the processes involved,” Simpson said.
Brannen hopes that his book will provide readers with the context necessary to fully understand the role of carbon dioxide on Earth, as well as address common misconceptions about carbon dioxide regarding climate change.
“I think there are a couple of common talking points that climate deniers will latch on to that are 100 percent true, but they just lack the context,” Brannen said. “Those facts taken out of context are kind of misleading because the context is everything.”
According to Brannen, by gaining a better understanding of how our planet works, readers might be more inclined to address what is at stake during this age of climate turbulence.
“It’s going to require concerted political intervention at a certain point to change the trajectory [of the climate crisis], which is also something to be hopeful about, because I feel like your generation, not to be too cliche about it, is actually way more engaged on these issues than when I was in college,” Brannen said.
With his experience researching and writing about these issues, Brannen has become increasingly appreciative of the extraordinary essence of our planet.
“I think my experience writing this book, and something that I’d want the reader to come away with, is that I left with a profound gratitude that I’m even alive to begin with,” Brannen said. “All the amazing developments over Earth’s history allowed it to be this wonderful place—it is an absolute miracle.”