← Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
What Carbon Dioxide Has to Do With the Meaning of Life
00:59:27
Rob talks to Peter Brannen, author of the new book The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything.
Loading summary
Transcript73 lines
- [00:01]
A
You are listening to Shift Key Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. This week, it's a big why the story of CO2 is the story of everything. Why the chemistry that powers you is not so different from the chemistry that happens inside a coal power plant or a fire for that matter. Why 98% of Earth's coal was produced in just one era. And why life itself on Earth may have emerged from an energy flow of all of that and more. It's a transcendent episode of Shift Key, I think, and it's coming up right after this. America's future depends on reliable power provided where and when it's needed. It depends, in other words, on long duration energy storage. Hydrostor's advanced compressed air energy storage technology is helping build the grid of tomorrow. With secure, reliable power and thousands of American jobs. With bipartisan support and a flexible supply chain, long duration energy storage storage is the missing puzzle piece to scale energy independence. Learn more about Hydrostor's Willow Rock project and the future of energy storage@hydrostore.ca hi, I'm Robin Zemeyer, the founding executive editor of Heat Map News, and you are listening to ShiftKey, Heatmap's weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. My co host, Jesse Jenkins is off this week. He will return next week. This week on Shift Key, we're talking about carbon dioxide as we always do. I guess we're always kind of talking about carbon dioxide on this podcast, but this week it's a little different. Normally on the show when we talk about carbon or CO2, we're talking about the in the context of the energy system, you know, fossil fuels are made out of hydrocarbons. They're made out of hydrogen bonded to a carbon atom. As a refresher here, the the simplest hydrocarbon is methane. It's four hydrogens bonded to a single carbon molecule. Methane is the principal component of natural gas. But you can have bigger and bigger hydrocarbons too. Longer and longer chains of carbon and hydrogen bonded together. And as they get bigger and bigger, they become gradually more liquid and then more solid. Meaning they give us, you know, petroleum and then coal. But of course, carbon and oxygen for that matter, is not just in fossil fuels. It's the basic building block of life itself. 18% of your mass as a person is carbon and 65% of your mass is oxygen. You are a carbon and oxygen based life form. Listening to this podcast right now. And of course, the dinosaurs were carbon based life forms. Too. Trees are carbon based, plankton are carbon based. And when some of those plankton die and break down and go into the earth and don't get decomposed for hundreds of millions of years or tens of millions of years, they become oil. And then we burn that oil and we emit CO2. In a way, when you think about it, you can understand the whole sweep of history as a carbon based story. And that's what a new book does. Today we're joined by my friend Peter Brannan. He's an award winning science journalist and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. And I should say he's one of my favorite science and climate writers anywhere. His new book is called, appropriately, the story of CO2 is the story of Everything. And it's out now from Ecco. It has a really ambitious title, but I think Peter pulls it off and he weaves together a single story going from the creation of the universe to the emergence of life on Earth to, yes, the invention of the steam engine and climate change. It's a book that's kind of not about politics at all, but is surprisingly politically relevant. It's a book that blends together geology and biology, biology and economics and political economy into one kind of carbon braid, long carbon braid going back all the way to the creation of the universe. It's one of the best things I read this year on thermodynamics as well, I should say. And Peter is joining us today to chat about all of those topics. I'm so excited to have him. Peter Brannan, welcome to Shift Key.
- [04:17]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [04:19]
A
I want to first start by, can you explain the book's title?
- [04:25]
B
Yeah, so it's a kind of long, strange book and we actually had a difficult time coming up with the title for it, and we finally settled on this somewhat clunky sentence, which is the story of CO2 is the story of everything. And it took me a while to come around to that, and then I just realized, like, you know what? That is what the book's actually about. I am making that claim. And I can justify that claim because I started pulling on this thread and eventually I found myself writing about almost everything in Earth history. And the reason is that, yeah, CO2 is often talked about in a lot of press coverage for good reason, as it's just this industrial byproduct that happens to come out of smokestacks and it's causing warming today and all these other problems we're worried about, which is incredibly urgent. And all of that is true. But I come to it from a geoscience Earth science perspective. And there you learn about CO2 in this totally different context, which is that its behavior on planet Earth is really what makes planet Earth planet Earth. And there's a couple reasons why there's these kind of two miraculous features of it, that if just one gas did one of these things, it would be incredible. But the fact that both of these things are carried out by C2 is amazing. So it both maintains a habitable temperature for planet Earth, which is a good thing. Everyone knows it's a greenhouse gas. If it all disappeared tomorrow, the temperature would plummet by 60 degrees or something in half century and we'd be living in a snowball Earth and all animal life would get wiped out. That's bad. So it's good that there's some CO2 and then you learn about it in the context of mass extinctions, which is when way too much comes out of the ground way too fast, it kills almost everything on the planet. So that's very bad as well. And it manages to maintain this very narrow window over hundreds of millions of years for the most part. But the other amazing feature of it is that life on Earth is carbon based. And the source of that carbon is CO2, which enters the biosphere through plant life and photosynthesis and through this magic act that they pull off by turning CO2 into basically the stuff of life and then powering the rest of the biosphere, which then feeds off it and eventually returns it as CO2 back into the environment. This is how the planet works. It keeps it both habitable and inhabited. So I wanted to tell that story and obviously by pulling on those threads, it just led very kind of out of control.
- [06:32]
A
Well, and I feel like both talking to you during the writing process and also in my own writing, kind of encountering aspects of this. You pull off something incredible in the book, which is that by focusing on these two aspects of CO2, the fact that it controls the planet's climate, and that it also is what we are all made of. We are carbon based life. You're able to write a single narrative that goes from literally the first nanosecond of the universe through the creation of Earth, to all of biological history on Earth, including all this stuff. And this has always been such a strength of your work, is that you are so good at describing the worlds that existed on the planet before the dinosaurs. The kind of parts of the Natural History Museum that have weird squid looking things and crabs and you like rush through them on the way to the dinosaurs. You're so good at describing that. But it's a single narrative that ties from the universe to that through our current industrial society. And not only that, but the current engine of our industrial society, which is the exploration and consumption of fossil fuels to produce energy, which basically is responsible for all of technical civilization. It's like incredibly impressive.
- [07:47]
B
Thank you. No, I appreciate it.
- [07:49]
A
I think that one, one thing you keep harping on in this narrative is that it's the same chemical reaction at the heart of all of this. Not necessarily in the heart of what controls the planet's climate, but in terms of why CO2 is such a potent energy source. There's one basically chemical reaction that is at the heart of the whole thing. Can you talk a little bit about what that reaction is and how it works and why it's so important?
- [08:18]
B
Sure. So I anchor the book at the beginning in this French aristocrats lab, right before the French Revolution. Unfortunately, this guy would get his head cut off, but this guy Lavoisier, who's kind of the founder of the periodic table and discovered oxygen and. But he ran this incredible experiment that really captured my imagination, which was that he put this hapless guinea pig in this contraption that he called an ice calorimeter, where this thing was stuck in there and he measured the gases that were going in and the gases that were coming out. And there was a amount of ice underneath it. And he measured how much ice was being melted and he noticed that oxygen was going in, CO2 is coming out and a measurable amount of ice was being melted. And he did the same experiment with a chunk of charcoal and he noticed it was the exact same reaction. Oxygen was going in, CO2 is going out and the thing was producing heat and melting amount of ice. And he was the first to realize that aerobic respiration. So what's powering me and you right now and every other animal on Earth is the exact same chemical reaction as fire, as combustion. So we are in sort of.
- [09:23]
A
Yeah, sorry, keep going.
- [09:25]
B
Yeah. So it's organic matter, which is what life makes, what plants make, and you burn it with oxygen and you make CO2 and you release CO2 and water and it releases heat. And in a fire that's just lost as heat and light. But for us, it powers our thoughts, our. When you go for a run, everything you do. And it also happens to be the same reaction that is currently powering 80% of industrial civilization and has actually been used as this sort of external metabolism by humans for their entire evolutionary History in fire. So there is this intimate connection between this reaction and our evolutionary history. But the trick that makes it all possible is making that organic matter to begin with, this energy dense stuff that you can burn. And that was sort of the original trick of life at the origin of life, which we can get into. But that's also kind of a complicated.
- [10:12]
A
No, I want to get into it in a second. But first, where does the energy in that reaction come from? It comes from snapping the O2 off.
- [10:18]
B
The carbon, like the carbon hydrogen bonds, like breaking those with oxygen, because oxygen is kind of angry and wants electrons more than the organic matter has it. And so you just give it a kickstart and it will steal them from them. That's why we breathe by oxygen mitochondria. At the end of like an electron transport chain, there is an oxygen that's waiting there, just dragging the electrons down to meet up with it again. And that powers these little turbines that make ATP, that make everything work. So it's this wild thing.
- [10:47]
A
Well, let's, let's talk about that for a second. So one case you make in the book is that the turbines that spin our industrial civilization. I mean, a few weeks ago on Heat Map we were talking about how most forms of electricity generation are just steam through a turbine. Right. But you make a case that in our mitochondria there's a nano machinery. And it actually also looks kind of like a turbine. Can you just talk about what is happening there?
- [11:17]
B
Yeah, you can find a GIF of this thing online, ATP synthase. And it's absolutely miraculous that this thing works. I mean, it's literally a spinning turbine. But what I think is incredible about, and I draw this analogy at the end, is that the things that we're going to rely on in the future, like pumped hydro storage, work almost the exact same where. So in your cells, electrons are hopping down the electron transport chain, and as they do so, they push protons to this other side of a barrier where they don't want to be, and then much like pushing water uphill to use it later. And then as they are slowly let back down across this gradient, they turn this turbine that then makes ATP that then gets sent off. So it's kind of like pumped hydro storage where you're pumping it uphill where it doesn't want to be, and in its descent back down, it is turning turbines and sending electricity over transmission lines. And so I was just blown away that we've come 4 billion years and we're basically back at the beginning where we started.
- [12:14]
A
We're even using pumped storage to send electricity over the transmission lines. That are our neurons. Right. I mean, that's the.
- [12:24]
B
And I'm sure there's some microbiologist who's listening to this who's probably rolling their eyes because I'm a science journalist. So trying to get my head wrapped around this was like totally mind blowing. And there's a steep learning curve, but photosynthesis actually was not. The photosynthesis comes a few hundred million years after the origin of life. And I put the origin of life at these weird vents at the bottom of the ocean that sort of are making organic carbon, which is very difficult to do for free just because the Earth is out of equilibrium with the oceans. And at these weird vents, you have these metal catalysts that can react CO2 with hydrogen that's being. Coming out of the vents. The same sort of hydrogen that we're exploring for now for. I think it's. What is it? Gold hydrogen. I forget which color the natural hydrogen is. Yeah, so that's the original trick. And then there's this subsequent miracle photosynthesis by using the energy of the sun to power a similar reaction and that happens to leave behind oxygen.
- [13:15]
A
I want to make you actually go back to that explanation again, because I want to ask, is that another revelation in the book for me that I didn't fully understand, frankly, was that when we were taught about the origin of life, we're taught that there were these pools, there were stomat lights in them. Maybe you remember the word somatolites. There was this special kind of chemistry in the early Earth and it gave rise to amino acids and then life. And for me, I remember sitting in 9th grade biology and like watching David Attborough kneel next to tide pool and you argue, citing this ongoing scientific debate that frankly, I wasn't even aware of, that this is probably not where life originated. Life didn't start there. It started with a metabolism. Can you describe that?
- [14:07]
B
Yeah. So there's this ongoing debate in the origin of life community that's between the so called metabolism first versus information first people. And the information first is probably the stuff that most people are familiar with. It's that you have some warm little pond somewhere and get some amino acids and you get some rna. And then RNA can do all sorts of cool stuff. It can catalyze reactions that I only perform by protons and it can also carry information. So this is an amazing thing. So maybe you just get that and you're off to the races. It can eventually bootstrap the rest of life into existence. Now, one of the things that has to bootstrap into existence is this miraculous, like, metabolic machine that's at the heart of all life. And there's this at least growing community that I was in conversation with in the book, where they just think that that's impossible, that it had to have been this incredible electrochemistry at the dawn of life, because life is incredibly energetic. Life is electric. Every cell in your body goes through something like a million electrons a second or something like that. It's powering these crazy turbines. And so what is incredible about this one specific kind of vent, it's called an alkaline hydrothermal vent, is that at the dawn of life, it would have almost exactly replicated this, like crazy electrochemistry that you have in all of your cells. You had CO2 out of equilibrium in the ocean and these acidic oceans that was out of equilibrium with these hydrogen rich alkaline zips. And you had these vents with metal catalysts. And suddenly you can start getting all of these energetic biomolecules that are still at the heart of all metabolism today. You can just start pumping them out for free. And so people are currently going out to the middle of the Atlantic and drilling into the crust and trying to find, to see if the Earth is just making these reactions for free. And then from there you can plausibly build up the kind of biochemistry where you're making RNA and DNA and stuff like that. Again, there's a lot of like yada, yada, yada here. But, yeah, that's where the two camps are.
- [15:58]
A
And these aren't these vents at the bottom of the ocean aren't the violent vents that you see in footage from Alvin with like little worms, you know, the tube worms going around? There's something different, right?
- [16:11]
B
Yeah, those are probably too hot and violent to support early life, which probably would have been pretty fragile. These are these very ghostly. If you look up like Lost City hydrothermal field online, you'll see these very ghostly white spires. Yeah, that almost look, I think I compare them to like the Sagrada Familia or something like that. The more we learn about the beginning of Earth history, it seemed like it was a violent, very watery world. There might not have been much land to begin with to have warm little ponds. The oceans might have been twice as deep as they are today. The surface would have been bombarded with UV and lightning and all sorts of horrible stuff. And so it just wouldn't have been a nice place to be so maybe a gentle little vent at the bottom of the ocean is more pleasant.
- [16:50]
A
What I love about the metabolism first theory of life as you lay it out in the book and stipulated that you're a science journalist, I'm a climate journalist. If there's a biogeochemist listening. Thank you so much for listening to SHIFT Key and feel free to email us, you can find us at SHIFT keymap News. What I love about it is that it's reorients life from a kind of informational process, one of replication to one of energy flows, that there was just free energy flow happening at the bottom of the ocean. And that's what life situates itself around. And you the the free energy flow, this free gift of energy at the bottom of the ocean is where life itself begins. And rather than life kind of creating and then needing to go look for energy, it's actually the opposite. It's the energy created life. And then later on as you write, RNA and DNA took over, information took over after that. But at first was the energy flow.
- [17:53]
B
That way of thinking about life reframes it not as just this miraculous thing, but kind of this inevitable thing that the early Earth was very out of equilibrium and frustrated and it needed something to come along and relieve that chemical equilibrium.
- [18:06]
A
What do you mean? Sorry.
- [18:07]
B
I analogize it to a hurricane where we think of a hurricane as this complex self organizing structure that we think of as this hugely energetic thing, which it is, but it's more accurately thought of as this thing that dissipates energy, where you have this frustrated source of energy and the surface waters the ocean and eventually that heat has to get raised, reradiated back out to space and it has to get distributed around the planet. So rather than an addition of energy to the system, hurricanes are this channel for its dissipation in the same way that life is sort of a channel for energy dissipation in systems that were chemically out of equilibrium at the beginning of life, rather than just this miraculous weird little replicating molecule that then somehow finds a way to power itself. This was just this rocket of biology right from the get go that eventually you need to keep it in control and in order for it to become life, it needs to replicate. And the story of DNA is like fundamental to life. But there is this transition period, at least the way I think about it, where geology transitioned into biology rather than just this strange chemistry going on somewhere on the planet.
- [19:19]
A
Skipping forward, you know, life evolves, life happens, geology turns into biology. There's a very Long time this boring billion where there's just what was life on Earth during this very, very long time. Because I think one thing you describe here is that we had life for a long, long time before we had life that looks anything like we would recognize it today.
- [19:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, you even have photosynthesis perhaps over 3 billion years ago, and you don't get much oxygen on the planet that we would be able to breathe until the last few hundred million years. So for a long time you kind of had all the pieces on the board and life or Earth was still just kind of a microbial world. There's this thing called the boring billion that some geochemists will get mad when you use that language about their Meso Proterozoic. But it is true that you have this thing called the great oxygenation event two and a half billion years ago. But then oxygen might crash for almost a billion years to very low levels. And animal life doesn't finally explode onto the scene until around 600, 500 million years ago is when it really takes off. So there's this awkward long period where not much happens. You do get the evolution of eukaryotes, which is obviously incredibly momentous, but for the most part they stay very simple and unicellular. You do get some very simple multicellular stuff, but you really don't get this sort of champagne cork of complex life until around 550 million years ago. So yeah, I mean, this is a something of a puzzle why there's this long boring interregnum. There's all sorts of different ideas. You know, a very long standing thing is that the final rise of oxygen is what lights the fuse for the Cambrian explosion, which people might be familiar with, when all body plans for all animals evolved pretty quickly. Another idea is it just was really difficult to get the software and the hardware to develop it because it's incredibly complicated. So this is also sort of a energy versus information debate as well. Again, because I'm like very much a materialist I lean towards. Life was constrained in its power. Like there literally was enough power on the planet if you don't have oxygen. Because burning your food with oxygen is much more powerful than any other comparable metabolism on Earth. And so animals are big, energetic, complicated things and they were just constrained by the environment for almost all of Earth history. Until you get this final rise of oxygen, where suddenly you can start burning organic carbon into CO2 and powering this engine of metabolism, which is, you know, as we know from our modern world, is a very powerful reaction. And that's why you don't get things like brains and complex organisms until. Yeah. So why.
- [22:03]
A
I saw a tweet the other day that was like, if plants breathe the air, why can we breathe in the winter? And I thought that was actually surprisingly, if plants breathe the air and then all the leaves fall down, why can we breathe in the winter?
- [22:18]
B
It's because there's a massive surplus of oxygen in the air that.
- [22:21]
A
Well, I thought it was surprisingly profound because people were replying like, oh, it's the Amazon, or, oh, it's the phytoplankton in the ocean. But actually neither the Amazon rainforest nor the current living phytoplankton are why we have this surplus of oxygen. So why do we have this big surplus of oxygen in there?
- [22:35]
B
Yeah, so this is another one of those things for me in learning about it in the book was kind of mind blowing and reframed how I understood how the planet works. And I think it really is a secret of the geology community, for the most part, that the incredible abundance of oxygen in the air, which is this gas that doesn't really want to be there, it reacts with everything. And so I, I mean, the reason.
- [22:57]
A
Right, is because there's 21% oxygen. The. And it's. Well, let me actually just ask a outright question which is like, why did. Do we have a surplus of oxygen in the air in the first place? It was for me, also something I did not understand at all before I read the book.
- [23:11]
B
Yes. So there's this common trope that two out of the next three breaths you have is from phytoplankton in the ocean, or a quarter of it is from the Amazon alive today. And there's a sense in which that's true because oxygen and CO2 are being exchanged very quickly in the biosphere. But there is something like 800 times more oxygen in the air that can be produced by the entire biosphere. And all of the oxygen that's produced by like the rainforest, say the rainforest is a living system where everything else is consuming that organic matter and feeding off of it. And it's kind of a wash. Just as much oxygen is created by the trees as is consumed by the things that are by the bugs and fungi and jaguars and all the things that are living in the rainforest that are feeding off those plants and respiring that plant matter back to things like CO2 and water. So on a net scale it's a wash. And that gets you a planet with like close to zero oxygen. And instead we have this Absurd abundance of this thing that wants to react with everything. And the only way you can do that is if, say, if you imagine a tree, and when it dies, rather than being decomposed by fungi and beetles and on, on and on, that tree suddenly gets buried in sediment and falls into the crust and becomes part of the rock record. And the oxygen it made at life is not used in its own sort of destruction. And by shielding that tree in the earth, you leave this surplus of oxygen in the air and over all of Earth history as a vanishingly small amount of this organic matter. Things like plants and algae do make it into the rock record. They leave an equivalent gift of oxygen in the air as a surplus. And we are more familiar with plant matter in the crust where it's economically exploitable. We call those fossil fuels. So in a weird way, the fact that me and you can breathe, I don't think a lot of people attribute that to the fact that there's fossil fuels in the ground. Luckily, most quote unquote, fossil fuels are very diffuse and like mudstones, and they're not economically exploitable. And we're never going to run out of oxygen by burning fossil fuel fuels because we worry about CO2 going up in parts per million and oxygens in whole percent. So it is true that for every molecule of CO2 we burn, we're bringing down oxygen by an equivalent amount. It's just not that concerning. But yeah, there is this astounding sort of way of reframing, looking at the world where the plant surface is breathable only because of what's happened in the rocks beneath it.
- [25:35]
A
Right. And I think kind of key to this is like if all the. You have a line that's like, if all the plants on Earth died, obviously terrible day for the world. However, the surface would still be breathable and it would remain breathable for a lot much longer, indefinitely, like, much longer than we would have, obviously, like other problems from all the plants dying.
- [25:54]
B
Yeah, you'd have nothing to eat, but you could breathe. And the kind of punchline of the book, I mean, this is. It's not. Punchline's the wrong word. But we found ourselves on this planet as a species after this hundred million year process where you built up this huge reservoir of flammable stuff underneath our feet. And by virtue of the fact that it's there, you have this incredibly reactive atmosphere above it, and then we are in the middle, forcing these two reservoirs to react. The biggest disequilibrium in all of Earth history. So if the origin of Life was powered by some very kind of tiny little chemical disequilibrium. We are now discharging the biggest one in all of Earth history that's taken all of Earth history to build up. And we're doing it in a matter of centuries to power these completely unthinkable industrial societies and things. And you really can't explain the story of the last few centuries without recourse to this kind of astounding planetary transformation that we are currently undergoing, where we are undoing 500 million years of this process happening.
- [26:59]
A
I mean, that insight, I think, just that, like, we could only breathe the air because of fossil fuels, and not only fossil fuels, but things seeping into the muck and then becoming mudstones or various forms of geology. Not something I ever understood. Ten years of being a climate writer didn't really understand that. Couldn't have told you where the surplus oxygen came from. I knew, you know, when the Northern Hemisphere has its winter, CO2 goes up by 2 parts per million or so. And that's because all the leaves in the Northern Hemisphere, where there's more land than anywhere else, fall to the ground and decompose. And the CO2 goes back up into the air. Could not have told you, though, why that the air remains breathable. You talk, you have a wonderful description of this one era in life's history where basically all the coal comes from. Can you? What is that era and what made it special?
- [27:52]
B
Yeah, I mean, it is the aptly named Carboniferous, just because there is so much carbon in the strata there. It's the Carboniferous through the Early Permian is 2% of Earth history, but it's 90% of where the coal comes from. And there's a couple ideas. I mean, it is truly an alien world. Dinosaurs are kind of a useful mile marker for people in Earth history, and we're tens of millions of years before dinosaurs. So this is 315 million years ago. Dinosaurs evolve around 240, 230. Really don't take over the planet till 200 million years ago. So we are over 100 million years before the true age of dinosaurs.
- [28:26]
A
And to some degree, I mean, this era is farther from the age of dinosaurs than dinosaurs are from us.
- [28:31]
B
Oh, yeah, definitely. And then I could be annoying and talk about birds and how they're dinosaurs, but I won't do that here. Anyways, so the Carboniferous is a kind of alien world where it wasn't that much earlier that all terrestrial life started taking off a few tens of millions of years earlier. You get the first trees, and then in the Carboniferous you get these really bizarre trees that don't resemble any trees today. And there is so much carbon going into the rocks and what will eventually become coal, that oxygen is unbelievably high in the atmosphere, which has this nasty side effect of helping contribute to this being the age of gigantic insects and bugs. And just. I mean, I'm sure some entomologists would love it, but if I had a time machine, I would never go back to the Carboniferous. You would step outside your time machine and a dragonfly with a two foot wingspan might land on your shoulder and centipede the size of a crocodile might walk by and a scorpion the size of a golden retriever, they're around as well. So I'm kind of appalled by this age of Earth history. But there's a lot of coal in the ground. It might be because the fungi that breaks down wood is very, you know, breaking down wood is very difficult to do. Maybe they hadn't evolved yet. Now that's kind of fallen out of favor. And it more just seems that this was a tectonic period where in Pangea is assembling. And you would have had these huge mountains in the tropics that would have caused these big subsiding lowlands and in the tropics with huge these rainforests everywhere. And the sea level would have been going up and down because there's ice on the planet at the same time at the poles. And so you would have been repeatedly just having these rainforests that are then covered in sediment and then rainforest covered in sediment. And so you just get these kind of bar striped coal layers from this age. And in fact so much coal was buried. So I talked about the oxygen part making the bugs big. But CO2 dropped so low in this period that the planet almost dropped back into a snowball Earth where it would have glaciated to the tropics and this would have been the end of animal life too. And so all the coal going into the earth 300 million years ago sequestered so much CO2 that it nearly threatened the end of the world. So you just flip that equation and you think, all right, well what would it do if we dug it all out of the ground and lit it on fire in a couple centuries? That probably would warm it up a little bit. And that's what we're seeing today.
- [30:41]
A
And oxygen then was like 35%. Yeah, the key.
- [30:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. So like rain soaked rainforests were just combusting into flames and these fires that were unbelievably hotter than any on Earth today. Like it was a really flammable crazy age.
- [30:56]
A
This episode of Shiftkey is brought to you by Hydrostore. The US Economy is growing fast and so is its demand for reliable energy. But generation alone isn't enough. Long duration energy storage is the key to building a resilient, secure grid that can meet tomorrow's needs. Hydrostor's advanced compressed air energy storage technology stores clean energy for hours at a time and then delivers baseload power when it's needed most. Hydrostor's Willow Rock energy storage center in California will provide 500 megawatts of storage, enough to power a city of half a million people for more than eight hours and employ over 6,500 people during construction. Backed by bipartisan support at all levels of government, Hydrostor is leading the charge in utility scale storage. With projects underway across America, we're helping communities unlock economic growth and achieve energy independence. Learn more about Hydrostor's unique technology and how it's powering America's future@hydrostore.ca. your book then walks us through the rest of Earth history. I mean, it proceeds from the Carboniferous through further mass extinctions, ultimately up to this moment in the 19th century where people, and specifically people living in this one corner of Europe, begin to harness coal for an economically productive reason. I think one interesting point you make is that coal, which is in many ways the most abundant and easiest to access fossil fuel, was used in human history for a long, long time, but its consumption only takes off explosively starting in England in the early 19th century. Why is that? Or what did you ultimately, why did you ultimately decide that is? Because in some ways this is the most important question in Earth history, right? Why does the Industrial Revolution happen to happen in, in England and in Europe and the United States as opposed to somewhere else?
- [32:56]
B
That's a great question. And there's entire conferences dedicated to try and figuring that out. But yeah, I do point out in the book that coal has been used, I mean, probably well into prehistory, but there's a archaeological record at least 3,600 years ago in China, like pretty widespread use. It was used in England for a long time. You know, Roman baths were heated with it. And in the 1300s you could get executed by the king if you burnt too much dirty sea coal. And people described London as being a horrible coal filled place well before the Industrial Revolution, but it was used for different applications, so it was used mostly just for its heat and things like brewing and things like that. I do think the steam engine really was, I think, a very revolutionary invention. There were a few versions of it, but the one that eventually became commercially viable and all the subsequent versions of it where converting the energy compressed in millions of years of fossil sunlight to do work on the surface of the planet rather than just release its heat, really was a game changing technology. And the other unavoidable thing is the unique and idiosyncratic political economy of early modern Europe into industrial age Europe, where it does seem like there was this new way of organizing society and nature that had some things in common with lots of other human societies in Earth history, but was unique in some ways. This thing that I'm dancing around is called capitalism, to put it very simply. It was a system that was premised on growth and production. And before the availability of fossil fuels and the steam engine, classic economists were like Smith and Ricardo and Malthus, really thought that any period of growth was going to be self limiting. And this was hard won by millennia of human experience where human societies were constrained by the photosynthesis on Earth's surface. And it seemed like there was this eternal limit where if you had a Hierarchical Agricultural Society, 90% of people were going to have to farm to support 10% that didn't. And by suddenly releasing all those energetic constraints all at once by all of the energy in all of Earth history, you suddenly get this explosion in the 19th century. It really hits high gear.
- [35:17]
A
You have a particular way of understanding the Earth, wherein the moment we find ourselves now and the moment humanity finds itself in when it evolves is there's all this energetic stuff buried below the surface and there's all this oxygen in the air. And they want to react to each other, but they don't fully get to react to each other until ultimately something happens in human society to unlock that, to really catalyze that reaction. And what happens is material, is political, is economic, and is ultimately also a result of ideas and things happening in people's brains that lead them to want to go find as much coal as they can.
- [36:02]
B
Yes. So I really do want to stress that it's sort of tricky talking about this stuff like it's another natural phenomena. Like the Industrial Revolution was like the origin of life and it was just inevitable. And because there are historical actors and there's a lot of villainy in history and people have agency and more responsibility. And I don't want to downplay that. I guess a key reason to be hopeful for the future is that because unlike previous episodes in Earth history, where and this has happened before actually, where lots of coal and gas and oil was burnt and injected into the atmosphere. It just was in these mind bending volcanoes I talked about earlier in Earth history. And it causes the biggest mass extinctions of all time. The same thing chemically is happening right now, but it's mediated through human institutions and human actors and people. And so those lessons are instructive from Earth history because they show you how bad things can go when we run the sort of chemistry experiment we're running on. It can be in the long term, but this one really is different because it's us that are doing it and human history. I do kind of lean into the materialist perspective, maybe too hard in this book, but I also do think that we are different than a hurricane or a big volcano. I do have more faith in our ability to change.
- [37:20]
A
Do you have a fact that's like 8 billion people alive today can do 500 billion people's worth of pre industrial labor? Is this the story here? To some degree, the universe getting better at dissipating free energy and organizing it into these big structures, whether they're hurricanes or one celled life, or the S&P 500 that are just incredibly good at taking latent energy and then turning it into waste heat?
- [37:51]
B
Well, we are part of the story of the universe. We're part of the universe. So we are necessarily bound by the constraints that physics imposes on us. The big overarching one of which in my mind is the second law of thermodynamics, where a long, long time ago everything was all together and really hot. And a long, long time from now, everything's going to be all apart and highly disordered and very cold. And that's a one way journey. And so anything that sort of accelerates the universe on its way to that destination will in some sense be selected for. So that's all very high minded. And like, what do I mean by that? So the only way to make something very low entropy in our universe, because entropy is only going up, is you need to be exporting lots of disorder and waste heat to the environment in order to make these very complicated structures. And so life, even though it's highly ordered and unlikely, is actually in service of this broader goal of generating entropy, because it's incredibly good at generating entropy, which is sort of counterintuitive that the only route to, to this like high entropy end state is through these very complicated low entropy kind of way stations along the way, life being one of them, hurricanes being another one. So there is this trend over the history of life where not only is life an improvement on prebiotic chemistry in terms of not only making these complicated structures, but generally increasing broader entropy that life over its history has increased its energy use both in the microbial world and in the world of animals by something like 18 orders of magnitude over the history of life where competition for scarce resources drives ecosystems towards greater energy use, basically. And that is as true over human history as it is over natural history, where the world of a farmer forager or a forager mapping onto wild resources just is not using as much energy in the environment as a pre industrial farmer, or certainly not the fossil fueled world we live in today. So in some ways it's not surprising that we are part of that broader trend. But again, I really have to emphasize that I'm not trying to naturalize the last few centuries or make it seem like it was all inevitable, but it is sort of eerie the ways in which humans are part of this story and now have sort of jackknifed it into this freakish fossil fueled metabolism, which is an order of magnitude more energetic than even aerobic metabolism alone. And so we've suddenly just accelerated this trend so incredibly dramatically in this course of a couple centuries that there's no way you can do that without totally transforming the surface of the planet and how social life and the atmosphere, and there's no way you can do that without being incredibly disruptive. And that is a reason why things look the way they do.
- [40:42]
A
I guess it's the only. It's also the only way I can talk to you right now, or that we can be talking to people listening to this podcast? What do you think is most impoverished after writing this long narrative of carbon dioxide through history? What do you think is most impoverished about our understanding of climate change in the press, in politics?
- [41:05]
B
For me, it's just that it is this kind of cosmic perspective on how unusual what we're doing is right now, where, you know, some people talk about it in the same breath as, you know, there was acid rain in the 80s and 90s and you know, there's methylmercury emissions from coal plants and all those things are very important environmental issues. But this one really is different because it is this one off explosion of this planetary battery that took 500 million years to generate. We're pushing on the carbon cycle as far as we know, about as hard as has ever happened in the age of animal life. And this thing, the carbon cycle, is what makes the planet habitable. As I was saying earlier and so there are, you know, you can find more extreme warming events in the past, but they took place over tens of thousands of years. What we're doing right now is really no analog, not only in human history. So sometimes you'll hear people talk about, oh, there was a little ice age in human history and we dealt with that. And I actually write about that in the book as well. But this is not only unprecedented in human history, this is almost unprecedented in all of geological history. So for me, coming to it from a deep time paleontological perspective, everyone, I think, who pays attention is appalled by what we're doing on the planet today in terms of CO2 emissions and warming. But for me, there's this extra sort of cosmic perspective on it. You know, this is the only habitable planet we know of in the universe and it's modulated by this one thing, CO2, and we are really pushing on it as hard as possible. I think to fully appreciate how radical the experiment running on this deep time perspective is helpful.
- [42:39]
A
It seems to me to be this incredible response to, and not to make this about national politics, but it does seem to me to be this incredible anecdote to lines you hear from the Trump administration. Right. Politicians argue, for instance, that CO2 has made photosynthesis happen faster on the surface the of of the planet, that CO2 is this kind of actually glorious building block of life and it unlocks, provides all this free energy, this cheap free energy. And given that the worst thing on the surface of the Earth is poverty, that therefore, I mean, the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, argues this, the worst thing on Earth is poverty. And so therefore we have a duty to unlock as much energy as possible, to burn as many fossil fuels as we can, because that is what gets rid of poverty. And it seems to me that this book is a tremendous response in some ways to that point of view because it says, yes, CO2 actually is incredible. Fossil fuels are incredible. They are the building block of our modern economy, but they're really, really potent. And that we're messing with something that we don't fully understand. It doesn't mean that we need to get rid of the economic prosperity that we've experienced because of fossil fuels. But we burned already. But it does mean that we need to understand chemically what we're doing here, because CO2 actually is different from other pollutants.
- [43:58]
B
Republican politicians will post something where it's like, CO2 is great. It's plant food, it's why life exists. And I'm like, yes, absolutely, I agree. I Also think we need to immediately stop burning all fossil fuels, or at least as fast as possible. So there is this half told story where they're kind of half getting it, but not really. And yeah, I mean, there is this effect called CO2 fertilization and there's some estimate where it's increased photosynthesis by something like 12% in the last few decades. And you know, that is true, but it's also irrelevant for future projections of crop yields and things like that. Where if we have a world with increasingly erratic droughts and then punishing rainstorms and changes in precipitation, where suddenly things can't grow where they used to, that makes that previous technically correct point totally irrelevant. So yeah, you can cherry pick stuff here and there and tell purely a positive story of CO2, which is not what my book is. I think I've gotten questions already where it's like, oh, so you're telling us CO2 is a good thing? And I'm saying yes, it is. And in fact, because it's so important to how the planet operates, that is why you don't want to mess with that much because usually it's finally imbalanced and it's this amazing thing on the planet and when it gets out of control, then it can overwhelm the whole system.
- [45:11]
A
I mean, your previous book, also an amazing book, which I recommend, called the Ends of the World, is basically all about how like, you know, there's five mass extinctions across Earth's history. One of them is caused by the asteroids. The other four mass extinctions are because the Earth system, not people or not some kind of life as far as we know, emitted vast, vast amounts of CO2 very quickly. And you know, volcanoes linked up with what would have been fossil fuel reservoirs to burn and then dump massive amounts of CO2 into the air. CO2 is so important, in fact it is, has been not only the knob on the planet's climate, but it's the knob on when the Earth system veers into these extremely catastrophic events that take millions of years to recover from on a climatic basis and tens of millions of years to recover from in terms of regaining the complexity of life that had existed before the catastrophe.
- [46:04]
B
Yeah. So the reason why I wrote the first book is because I think in the public imagination there's this idea that extinctions happen when big rocks fall out of the sky. And that does account for one of them. But it turns out in the last few decades, as paleontologists have gone to the previous ones and look for evidence of asteroids, they don't find them and instead they do find what you were describing. In the majority of major and minor mass extinctions, you do have these continent spanning volcanoes that inject lots of CO2 into the air all at once. Like I describe in the book. It's a good thing that CO2 comes out of volcanoes because it keeps the planet habitably warm and gives life a feedstock of carbon. But right now we're putting it out 100 times faster than volcanoes. And in previous episodes in Earth history, where some CO2 is coming in from one part, it's also being buried and scrubbed out of the system at an equal rate somewhere else where there are these processes that CO2 reacts with rainwater and it wears down rocks and eventually the CO2 in the air is transformed to limestone and other rocks like that at the bottom of the ocean. And Even all the CO2 we're putting up into the air in the next century or so, in the very long run, it's going to end up as limestone on the bottom of the ocean. The problem is that those processes take hundreds of thousands of years. But what I think is sort of interesting is that there's people that are looking to things like accelerated rock weathering, where it's the exact same process. You just speed it up by a few hundred millennia by injecting CO2 directly into rocks that react with it and essentially turning it into things like limestone right there at the site. So I think that's a cool avenue of science just because it builds on this deep time legacy and is actually how the planet saved itself after mass extinctions. I also just try to temper our enthusiasm for some of these techniques because it's very difficult to make them scale at anything like the level that we would need to to counteract what we're putting into the air every year.
- [47:55]
A
The last two chapters of the book are basically about decarbonization. And you strike a kind of pessimistic note about our ability to decarbonize. Even as you say, this is essential. And I think it's really interesting if people should read it because it's actually good to see kind of all your thinking laid out. Why are you pessimistic in the end here about our ability to decarbonize?
- [48:16]
B
I don't think I'm necessarily.
- [48:18]
A
You would have been. Yeah, let me actually rephrase that. You know, in some ways I think you are skeptic. You're like a little skeptical and a little pessimistic at the same time of our ability to decarbonize do you think that summary is right? And do you think you were telling me you kept rewriting that section of the book? So do you think that as we got. As you got closer and closer to pub dates and so do you think that's like an accurate. How would you change it today?
- [48:42]
B
Well, I flag all the reasons why it will be difficult and then I say, well, obviously we have to do it anyways, even though it's hard. We just should be aware of how hard this challenge really is and not fool ourselves that it'll be easy. But I kept having to rewrite it because I started the book a few years ago and the story really has changed and I would not have written it quite as dourly as I did if I had to start that chapter today, for instance, because as you guys have amazingly documented, like the story around things like solar is, there's reasons to be genuinely optimistic now in a way that when I started the book about five years ago, it wasn't clear whether will this require epic levels of sacrifice to pull off, Which I still think it would be worth doing, because if you keep putting CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate we're doing, like, we know it can like literally end the world, if you believe Earth history. So the only way out is through. And here's all the difficulty in doing it. But it does just seem like increasingly these are just better technologies that deliver more energy and will be better in a lot of applications than this old fossil fuel world that we've been reliant on. So I would have written it a little more optimistically. I do still think, and maybe I'm a little too spooked because I hang out with geologists too much about some of the mining constraints, especially because I think on deep time, not only in the past, but into the future, and if we're going to be a sustainable society for centuries to millennia, you know, or grade is continuously declining in things like copper. And people at Glencore and S and P Global are already warning there's going to be copper shortages in the next decade, not because of geological constraints, but just because it's hard to permit mines and get them off the ground. But by the end of the century, unless we get incredibly good at recycling minerals, it seems like we're going to need an incredible amount of some stuff in the earth that we've already been mining copper for 6,000 years. So the average rock that you mine for copper, 99.5% of it, is not copper, it's waste rock.
- [50:49]
A
And that ratio is getting worse over time.
- [50:51]
B
Yeah, it's getting worse because we more.
- [50:53]
A
And more rock to get the same amount of copper.
- [50:56]
B
Yeah. But again, in the 20s, people were worried about the world running out of oil. So maybe it's just that we can throw enough money at it and exploration and refining techniques that, that we can't even imagine will come on board and save us. And any Cassandra talking about things running out has sort of been embarrassed over the last few decades, ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution. I just am of the mind that, well, it can't literally go on forever. And so we should start thinking about how to build our societies in ways that even if they emit zero carbon, are also sustainable and the future beyond that. But I actually don't know what that looks like. I just sort of shine a flashlight at it and say, this is concerning and I don't know how to fix it.
- [51:37]
A
It seems to me, I mean, you describe at the very, very beginning of life that if this metabolism first theory of life is correct, if there were these vents and they were shooting out chemicals and this allowed this gentle form of metabolism to happen, that then all of life gets built around is true. Then at some point, as you write, information had to take over. DNA and RNA had to take over and it had to go from a metabolism first world to a world that information controlled and reproduction controlled. DNA controlled. Right. Because that's ultimately what life looks like today. Not in a kind of narrow sense, but just in a. We know life knows how to create more of itself because of DNA and rna. And it seems to me. So you describe this like information transition that needs to happen. That I think that's even the word you use. And it seems to me that this is not so far from what needs to happen today, is that we have these incredible dynamos of built around in our economy, these sources of free chemical energy that we just have been able to find and that we've kind of built. We've searched the world for and scoured the world for and then built as we can around them. And it seems to me that there's like another information transition that needs to happen as we transition to both living off more sustainable forms of energy that come from the sun as it is now, or the wind, or the, you know, deep geology of the planet, if it's geothermal or nuclear. And that is also better able to conserve and better able to use these free gifts of energy that we've been given.
- [53:10]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that is what makes humans fairly unique is that I think there's some anthropology says we inhabit the symbolic niche unlike any other animal, where we do inhabit this informational landscape. And humans were able to endure incredible climate changes in the last ice ages, shifts of Perhaps more than 6 degrees C between these ice worlds and these warm interglacials like we have today. And it wasn't because we had huge fangs and thick hides and stuff. It's because we were able to pass down cultures and technologies and reorganize our societies in adaptive ways to get us through these climate shifts and navigate our way on the world. And so I know I'm speaking very abstractly and broadly just because I don't know what the future of human societies is going to look like. But I do put faith in the fact that as a society we are uniquely able to manipulate the world around us through the information landscape that we inhabit. And that does make me worried about the ongoing threat of our information landscape degrading obviously in ways that we can all experience when you go online these days. At some point, if we are in this Star Trek future where we're all living sustainably on the planet for geologically relevant times spans, something will have changed in our culture and societies that will have and have enabled that change. And I don't know what that looks like, but I guess I would encourage people to fight for that future.
- [54:32]
A
How did writing the book, it's such material book, it's so focused on these flows of CO2 and oxygen through time and you track them in all sorts of domains. How did writing this book change how you saw yourself and your own life and sense of materiality?
- [54:48]
B
I think it made me just indescribably grateful to be alive, to put it, I guess, kind of cheesily, but it really is a miracle planet. First of all, all the things that had to conspire to make this moment possible, that the air around you is breathable and the temperature is habitable, it's the result of these hundred million year processes and this incredibly delicate and finely tuned carbon cycle that has kept the planet habitable. And then learning about life on the very smallest scales, this incredible nanomachinery and biology that keeps you alive. It's just incredible that you don't disintegrate after 10 seconds based on all the things that have to go right. And I think if people reckoned with the miracle of life at the small scales, they'd be. They'd feel more grateful. And you can do that by looking up gifs of things like ATP synthase like I was talking about earlier, or kinesin this thing that, like, literally walks and delivers things around your cells.
- [55:42]
A
So the opening scene of the book is this geochemist who, I think you stumbled into their presence. One of the opening scenes is that you stumbled into their lecture at UC Boulder. And what did they say about life?
- [55:56]
B
This is this origin of life researcher Mike Russell, who actually predicted the existence of these hydrothermal vents that they eventually discovered that I write about in the book. He went around the audience and he asked them, what does life do? What's life's job? And people raised their hands and they gave these very highfalutin answers where it's, oh, it's the universe looking back at itself. And he just dismissed all these out of hand. And then finally he kind of let the air out of the room when he said no. Life's job is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide. It takes carbon dioxide from the environment and adds hydrogen to them. The only prebiotic molecule, CO2, everything you're sitting on a CO2, everything you eat is CO2. And I didn't even plan on having a chapter on the origin of life. And then I. I was in the audience for this, and I heard this talk, and I was like, oh, great, now I'm going to have to dive into this, into this world and everything after that.
- [56:45]
A
I mean, everything from the evolution of multicellular life to the evolution of complex animals to the evolution of human society. And now our industrial civilization has actually been distinguished by its ability to hydrogenate CO2 much more quickly, to oxidize it.
- [57:06]
B
Actually, because it's the plants that are doing the hydrogenation, and we just live off it by burning it. But that original trick was making life stuff, but we feed off stuff by burning it back to CO2. So I also have this quote in the book from Primo Levy, who I'm sure some of your readers will be familiar with. He's this brilliant Italian chemist who is a prisoner at Auschwitz, and he wrote this incredible book on the different elements. And he describes CO2 in this paragraph that I just was completely in awe of and included it in the book. That might be a good thing to read. Right?
- [57:40]
A
Yeah.
- [57:42]
B
So he writes about CO2, carbon dioxide, this gas which constitutes the primary material of life, the permanent store that every growing thing draws on. And the ultimate destiny of all flesh is not one of the principal components of air, but rather a ridiculous scrap, an impurity. The air contains.03%. That's obviously up to, like, 0.4 today. This, on the human scale is an ironic feat of acrobatics, a juggler's trick, an incomprehensible display of omnipotence and arrogance. Since it is from this constantly renewed impurity in the air that we come, we animals and plants and we human species, with our 4 billion discordant opinions, are millennia of history, our wars and shames, and nobility and pride. So I just love that quote. I do my best to try and chart that story as well in this book.
- [58:26]
A
I think that's a good place to leave it there. Pete Brandon, thank you for joining us on Shift Key.
- [58:33]
B
Thank you so much. It was great to be here.
- [58:35]
A
That will do it for us today. I should add, that was like Pete's version of the Michael Jordan flu game. He was up sick overnight and joined us basically first thing in the morning out of his devotion to you, the Shift Key listener, and our devotion to our production schedule. So thank you so much Pete. A heroic, heroic act of book promotion and also hopefully a really good conversation. And thanks so much for you too for listening to Shift Key. You can follow me on x obinsonmeyer or on bluesky or LinkedIn. If you enjoyed Shift Key, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. We'll be back next week with a full episode of Shift Key. Jesse will be back from summer break. He'll be joining us. Shift Key is a production of Heatmap News. Our editors are Ghislaine Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Komalow. Thank you so much as always for listening. Hang in there you fellow carbon based life forms and see you next week.