It is hard to overstate the importance of Peter Brannen’s latest book:The story of C02 is the story of everything.” This is a book with a vast and important scope and Peter Brannen does a superb job elucidating the cosmic importance of the Group 14 member of the periodic table, without which there would be no life on earth and with it IN EXCESS, biologic life could end in a sixth mass extinction.
I have been an amateur energy analyst for going on 2 decades and if ever I was called upon to teach a course on ENERGY, this book would be one of the core texts I would use. It is comprehensive, well researched and detailed and yet concise , well edited, annotated and entertaining. In order to understand how and why Carbon and its bonded pal C02 came to be the sine qua non of life you have to start at the beginning of our planet’s origins and explain how life began in deep sea hydrothermal vents and ancient bacteria such as cyanobacteria and stromatolites and eventually evolving into plant and animal life. This process became the Carbon Cycle in which life and cellular mass arise out of photosynthesis which uses sunlight to manufacture and fashion carbohydrates into ever more complex life forms which live and die and eventually decay while releasing oxygen, then utilizing oxygen to release C02 again and restart the same process of building life all over again. But not all of this carbon based life follows this path of decay and re assemblage. A portion escapes transported by slightly acid rain water via rivers to the deep ocean through a process called rock weathering sinking to the ocean floor and becoming Limestone, calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is also incorporated into other structures like coral reefs and the rock skeleton of creatures from plankton and bivalves like clams and oysters who also eventually add to the limestone forming on the ocean floor. This is another part of the carbon cycle.
This is the Cliff notes summary of the process. The next concept of greater importance is how this carbon cycle ebbed and flowed over eons, over millennia and hundreds of millions of years of almost chimerical changes in the earth’s geological cataclysms of volcanoes and massive lava eruptions as the planet assembled and disassembled its migrating land masses. These eruptions from the earth’s crust released vast quantities of carbon dioxide which heated the planet melting ice sheets raising sea levels. Plate tectonics drove land masses across these oceans into other land masses, forcing up mountains which then eroded and weathered down, carrying all that excess C02 back to the oceans and drawing down atmospheric C02 low enough to cool the earth enough to rebuild vast ice sheets and polar icecaps. This process repeated itself over and over again resulting in advancing and retreating ice ages right up to the present. The rising and falling C02 levels sometimes overshot and undershot with positive and negative feedback loops creating extremes of temperature which wiped out life on earth resulting in five major mass extinctions named after the geologic period in which they occurred such as Ordovician, Late Devonian and End Permian with the most popular one the so called late cretaceous perhaps caused by a giant asteroid impacting off Yucatán about 66 million years ago. That last extinction may in fact have been caused by a huge lava outflow in India called the Deccan traps which was releasing vast plumes of C02 and hydrogen sulfide at about the same time.
The core of the book is the eruption of C02 in the past 250 years caused by burning the accumulated carbon of several hundred million years in what Nate Hagens calls “The Carbon Pulse.” There have been many carbon pulses caused by volcanism and LIPs,(large igneous provinces) but this one has been generated by the most successful mammal. Humans discovered the amazing concentrated energy of plants growing in a period of the earth called not surprisingly, the Carboniferous Period. Peter Brannen says there is absolutely no doubt that elevated C02 raises the earth’s temperature and low C02 cools it. C02 is the earth’s thermostat. That is not to say that there are not other cyclical factors that augment these thermal climatic events such as changes in the earth’s elliptical orbit or tilting of the earth’s axis which alters how much solar energy hits different parts of the planet. The most single significant fact that Brannen states is the magnitude of the C02 rise in the atmosphere from 280 ppm at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to our current 421 ppm. The last time that happened was 3 million years ago. That fact is that the amount of C02 being released by man’s activities is one hundred(100!!!) times as much as is released by volcanoes annually. The next equally important fact is the RAPIDITY of that C02 release. There are many other factors happening at the same time which are not following arithmetic timelines trending forward. Some are exponential which can accelerate atmospheric and meteorological events in sudden step wise fashion which appears to be happening right now. The reader needs to know that this whole process is part of a complex inter related SYSTEM of checks and balances and feedback loops which if perturbed in certain directions can throw the whole system out of whack in unanticipated ways. If one accepts the facts and arguments laid out by Peter Brannen, one can not help but come to the conclusion that there is no validity to the argument of planet deniers that man’s carbon burning activities are not causing climate alterations.
The later chapters of this book address what strategies can be employed to alter the trajectory of climate change cased by carbon oxidation. Brannen also seems to go back and forth waxing between hope and despair about whether anything can be done to change our current trajectory. He covers all the suggestions being offered and lays out in careful detail how much these possible mitigations might work if manufactured at scale worldwide. I’ll give you a hint. The news is not good by my reckoning.
There are 12 chapters in the book and chapters 10 and 11 are a surprising bonus laying out the history of fossil fuel extraction since about 1750 to the present including the history of oil from the Middle East and the consequences to the world’s economy. He could not have anticipated the current feckless and tragic events unfolding in the Levant and Middle East as I write these words. These two chapters are worth the price of the book if you want to have a geostrategic and financial/economic overview of how we got to this point in world history. If you could care less about geology and paleontology but want to get a quick course in understanding the metabolism of this giant dissipative structure we call the SUPERORGANISM, those two chapters are a sobering gem. I would recommend reading this book with a pencil behind your ear and a notebook. There are so many surprising factoids about energy that I learned and I thought I was knowledgeable on the subject. I should also recommend Peter’s other book:The Ends of the World” which he wrote 7 years before in 2017 about the great mass extinctions. I actually read both books almost at the same time and really the two books are flip sides of the same coin. Any serious student of energy, paleontology , economics or geopolitics should read both. YouTube has some interviews with Peter. The one with Nate Hagens on his site “The Great Simplification” is particularly notable. Any serious student of Oil and energy will have to have this book on their shelf. It is an excellent companion to another book I previously reviewed on my blog “Oil, Power and War” by Matthieu Auzanneau.”
I would rate Peter Brannen’s latest book my nomination for The Book of the Year.
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