This is part 3 of our three-part series about elements. And today is a biggie: carbon. When we hear about carbon, it's usually about its role in heating up the planet. And while that's an absolutely critical part of the story, the story of this most miraculous of substances is so much larger.
We talk to Peter Brannen, author of The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything, about how carbon has always been central to just about every major turning point in the history of life on Earth...including why life is here in the first place.
CREDITS
This episode is hosted by Executive Producer Carlyle Calhoun. Editing help from Eva Tesfaye and Jack Rodolico. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste, and our sound design by Dennis Funk.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
I’m Carlyle Calhoun and you’re listening to Sea Change. This is part 3 of our three-part series about elements. And today is a biggie: carbon.
When we hear about carbon, it’s usually in this kind of context:
Newsreels:
"The planet is changing faster than we expected...
The report shows the US is warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole...
Get ready for the new normal, and in most places on Earth, it's not gonna be pretty ."
Climate change is no longer a distant fear. It has now become a clear and current threat. every ton of carbon unlocks even more carbon and even more warming
Stories and reports about how carbon emissions are heating up the planet. We tell a lot of stories related to that on this show…how it relates to sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, how it’s changing life on the coast, even your home insurance rates.
But really this whole series came about because I started thinking about how carbon is this essential element, perhaps the most essential, but a lot of us only associate it with the climate crisis. And I realized I actually knew an embarrassingly little amount about carbon beyond its role in climate change.
And so I called up an expert: science journalist Peter Brannen, who just wrote a huge book about carbon. And I asked him before we start, could he just tell me, what is carbon exactly?
Peter: Yeah. Um. It's a really good question. Uh, carbon. You'd think I'd have an answer for this…
Carbon is kinda hard to define even for the guy who just wrote a 450 page book about it. And maybe that’s because carbon, is kinda everything. I mean that is the title of his book: The story of CO2 is the story of everything.
Peter: You're carbon. I'm carbon. This table in front of me is wood. This is carbon. This computer is mostly plastic. This is carbon. I'm looking out my window, and it's just green and, uh, trees everywhere. It's all carbon. The birds that are landing on the branches are all carbon. So we really do live in a carbon world.
He tells me that’s because carbon is like this perfect Lego block. And it has the incredible feature that you can build really crazy stuff out of it. And it can store a lot of energy.
Peter: Carbon is the stuff of life. It is what all life on earth is made out of. I mean, yeah, how much more miraculous does it get than that?
Peter was also thinking about this carbon paradox…I mean let’s be honest, on a waaay deeper level than I was. That this most miraculous of substances has been kinda type-cast as the bad guy in recent decades. And while that’s an absolutely critical part of the story, there’s a lot more to it also. Like billions of years more to it.
So coming up after the break….carbon. Aka the stuff of life. And to tell the story of this miraculous element and what it means for the future of humanity, we’re gonna go waay back to the very beginning of life on this planet.
INTERVIEW FINAL
Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist. He specializes in telling really big dramatic stories about earlier times on Earth.
Carlyle: So Peter, not to start off on a downer, but I want to first ask you about mass extinctions. How did mass extinctions lead you to the story of carbon?
Peter: Yeah, so I, I wrote a previous book that was called The Ends of the World, which is about the biggest mass extinctions in the earth history. And the reason I wrote that book is because I'd noticed you know, sort of the idea in the public imagination is that they were caused by asteroid impacts, and there is one of them that was. But in the last few decades, as paleontologists went out looking at the previous mass extinctions, some of which were even much worse than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, but are not as well known to most people, um, they were. Caused by huge changes in climate driven by changes in CO2. So the news hook was that some of the changes we're seeing on Earth today, we have this really extreme record of what can go wrong in earth history, um, if this stuff gets too outta control.
Um, but in the course of writing that book, I realized that there's a much bigger story to tell about this stuff than just. The way you often hear about it, which is it's a scary thing that comes outta smokestacks and makes it warmer.So that's why I want, I wanted to sort of step back from the headlines about the stuffed carbon and reintroduce people to it as kind of this incredible thing on this planet.
Carlyle: Through your book, you take us on this 4 billion year journey showing us how CO2 is not just this kind of wicked greenhouse gas, but that CO2 is the very stuff of life. And in fact, it is the very reason life on Earth emerged. Uh, what do you mean CO2 is the stuff of life?
Peter: life is carbon based and there's good reason to think that. No matter where you find life in the universe, it's probably carbon based, because carbon really is kind of amazing. Um, the next thing down that's even remotely similar to it is silicon on the, on the periodic table. And there are some people who say, oh, maybe there's silicon life out there, but as far as we know, silicon kind of just makes rocks on our planet. It hasn't sort of self-organized into life, which is what. CO2 and Carbon did. Um, so that story begins 4 billion years ago.
I didn't think I was gonna have a chapter on this Origin of Life, but I was hanging out at the University of Colorado with some geologists and they brought in this guy Mike Russell. Who's a very, um, eccentric but brilliant scientist, . And he proposed that it started around these really weird vents At the bottom of the ocean, where you're turning CO2 into this life stuff. not with the help of sunlight, but with the help of this chemical energy that is, at these weird vents at the bottom of the ocean that are, sort of catalyzing. Sort of these fundamental reactions that are at the heart of all metabolism on every, in every life form on earth today. So that's all a story of CO2 on top of the story about the climate, um, that everyone knows about and has heard about.
Carlyle: Ok so let’s go back to the beginning of life on Earth. So what was early earth like? Was it a place we would like to live?
Peter: It was not a place we'd like to live. and this is one of the challenges to starting life is because it's such an unpleasant place. Um, so I think there's sort of this antiquated idea that at the beginning of earth history of these magma oceans and it just would've been lava everywhere. Um, and that was certainly the case right at the beginning, but kind of very quickly, the crust starts to solidify and. The early earth is an incredibly, it's an ocean world basically. the oceans might have been twice as deep as they're today. There pro there might have been little tiny volcanic island chains poking up above the surf somewhere, but, um, there might also have been no land exposed at all. So there's this classic idea of the origin of life that goes back to Darwin, where it started in a warm little pond somewhere, but there might not have been anywhere to put those ponds.
And even worse, if there was, there's. Devastating UV radiation. There's no ozone layer. There's just heart hurricanes around the clock and it's getting bombarded with asteroids all the time, so it's a miserable place at the surface. And way down at the bottom of those incredibly deep oceans, you sort of have these gentle nurseries, fizzing at these vents This was the hardest, that was the hardest chapter to write by far. Diving into the deep end of origin of life, uh, chemistry was, that was, that was quite a challenge.
Carlyle: so the theory is these deep ocean vents create the perfect natural laboratory for life to first emerge…and CO2 plays a critical role in all this complicated chemistry that I’m definitely not going to try to explain. But what struck me was really the wonder and kind of magic of life emerging from these vents that look like sandcastles. So yay there’s life, but as you were just describing early Earth is pretty terrible. And it’s really just a very slow evolution of life for like billions of years that we don’t often think about right?
Peter: Hmm.
Peter: Yes. I think people don't really appreciate the first 90% of earth history, if you had sort of just airdropped in, if you weren't wearing like a pretty serious space suit, you would die within minutes. because you know, for the first 2 billion years, there's really no oxygen at all on the planet. And then you have this thing called the Great Oxygen Donation event, but then it crashes probably for another billion years. And oxygen doesn't get up to a point where we would really be able to breathe it until like four, 400 something million years ago. So. Animal life and a world we'd recognize really only comes about in earth's old age, which is kind of this eerie fact about the fossil record that for so long, this planet, even though there's life, there's microbes. If I went back in time, you know, there really isn't anything going on on the planet more interesting than pond scum for the first 4 billion years.
Carlyle: (laugh) Wow. Okay. So what you're getting to also is that it's really only recently when we're thinking about Earth's history that Earth reached this kind of like. Perfect. happy place where life can exist. Right? I found this really amazing how kind of narrow that window is.
Peter: Yeah, it really is wild, that all this stuff, is so finely imbalanced, um, and has been for the entire age of animal life, even though there's been some near some close calls. but to give some context, So in the last 50 million years, so just in the age of mammals, when CO2 has been 0.1% of the atmosphere, there have been palm trees and crocodiles in the Arctic Circle. And then when it dropped to 0.01% of the atmosphere there was an Antarctica is worth of ice on top of North America, and sea level is 400 feet lower. And so that's a tiny, tiny little change. and it just shows you. how narrow that window is and also how miraculous it is that the earth has these ways of keeping it, from veering too far in either direction, which sometimes it does. And I talk about those catastrophes and and earth history in the book as well. These things like snowball earth when it gets really cold, obviously, and this thing called the End Permian mass extinction when it gets really hot. Um, as well, which are both stories of CO2 as well.
Carlyle: So, yeah. Let's talk about those huge swings, of, of CO2 that have happened throughout Earth's history. What caused them and what do they tell us about now?
Peter: Yeah. So in the book, I go to Death Valley with a couple of geologists, which, death Valley is the hottest place on Earth today. But they were going there to study literally the coldest the Earth has ever been because there are these, layers of rock there that capture this event called Snowball Earth, which I keep mentioning where you're at the end of this 4 billion year span, where not much has happened other than muck. and then the planet dives into its big, the biggest climate catastrophe in its entire history where, Ice sheets that form over the poles. eventually they start growing and growing and then they reach this kind of all is lost boundary of like 30 degrees latitude on either side of the equator. So not still pretty far away from the equator, but once you reach that far with ice sheets, they're reflecting off so much sunlight that that just becomes this runaway, catastrophic feedback where they keep growing and growing and there's nothing you can do about it until they reach all the way to the tropics. And then they stay that way for about 60 million years.
And the reason why the planet fell into this complete disaster is the Earth's main mechanism for getting rid of CO2 over its history, which is this thing called rock weathering, which is just what it sounds like, which is that when weather falls on rocks. So when rain falls on rocks, um, CO2 reacts with rainwater, it makes it a little more acidic, it falls on rocks. And then there's this chemical transformation where that carbon from the air is eventually carried out by rivers. Into the ocean where, CO2 will transform to limestone at the bottom of the ocean if you let the earth do its own thing and
Carlyle: it, which keeps the
Peter: Keeps the
Carlyle: That's way, it's checking itself.
Peter: Yes. It's the opposite side of the equation, from the fact that it's steadily being emitted by, from, by volcanoes is this long-term sink that it's like eventually getting weathering rocks and going to the bottom of the ocean in these rocks. So that was all, that was a long run up to try to explain why Snowball Earth happened, which is that this ancient supercontinent, right before snowball Earth was covered in these kinds of rocks, and then the supercontinent started to break up and it started exposing what had previously been this arid interior, this supercontinent that wasn't getting any rain at all. Was suddenly getting hit by hurricanes and it, and it was really warm out, and so it was weathering these rocks really, really fast. So much so that you pass this threshold where CO2 drops enough that then you, you glaciated the entire planet. and it stays that way for tens of millions of years until CO2 rescues it.
Carlyle: Ok so CO2 causes Snowball Earth because it drops so low. But then CO2 also comes to the rescue. How does CO2 now save Earth from being a snowball?
Peter: Well, so I said that there's these two sides of the coin. There's the weathering and then there's the volcanoes. And if you just cover up the entire continents, none of the rock's getting weathered. So none of the CO2 in the sky's, uh, getting buried anywhere. And photosynthesis is basically shut down as well because there's not much place for plants to live on this planet.
But in the meantime, you do have volcanoes poking up out of the ice sheets, and they're still steadily emitting this stuff. And so. Finally, after tens of millions of years, enough of this stuff has been accumulating in the atmosphere and not getting buried anywhere else on earth that it reaches an insane level. Where suddenly the whole snowball melts like catastrophically overnight. And you go into this ultra greenhouse where, sea level rises by like a kilometer in a century or something crazy. and you still have like melting parts of the ice on shore, but it's 150 degrees at the surface of the ocean.
So you get some of the wildest weather in earth history. You see evidence in the rocks for these like huge waves everywhere. So this is such a bizarre time. And then there's this mystery, which is how come when you the earth finally recovers from this thing? Animal life explodes after, not existing for its entire history. And I was sort of shocked the extent to which we don't understand, um, these fundamental transitions in earth history, how much they're open questions.
Carlyle: So these big swings of carbon dioxide is kind of. What propels evolution, and eventually, you know, the evolution of humans, right?
Peter: Yeah, well, it seems like snowball earth is this crucible for evolution. So over the age of, uh, animal life, you have periods when there's ice ages, like the ones that we recently just evolved from, and then you have some really warm greenhouse periods. Uh, when CO2 is high, which I'm sure people are familiar with, like the age dinosaurs, I think people think of this sort of warm jungle world. And then since they went extinct 66 million years ago when they did get hit by an asteroid, um. we inherit this greenhouse world from the dinosaurs, whether it's high CO2, it's really warm. And we evolved in that world.
And then for the last 50 million years or so, there's been this slow decline of CO2 and it's been getting cooler and cooler. Around 3 million years ago, CO2 finally declines enough that the planet loses enough of its blanket that we start going in and outta these crazy ice ages, uh, that shaped human evolution. So we are sort of unique in that we're this, uh, fire creature. We use fire. Um. It's sort of this external metabolism that keeps us alive. So, uh, other similar animal, like all other primates have, you know, much bigger chewing muscles and much longer colons 'cause they just eat raw food and they spend all day digesting and chewing it. And we've sort of outsourced a lot of that work to this stuff fire by cooking our food. And that was thought to be an innovation, you know, an adaptation to living through crazy ice ages. Um, fire's obviously also useful for mm-hmm. Uh, keeping us warm. And you can imagine it'd be useful in, in an ice age world. Uh, you know, some people made the argument that humans are so social 'cause you're, you have to hang around, you know, these campfires and stuff. So we are fundamentally an ice age creature, a low CO2 world creature.
So given that everything on the planet has evolved to this low CO2 pretty cold world compared to most of earth history, to suddenly impose, uh, an alien greenhouse from tens of millions years ago, you know, the greenhouse of the dinosaurs in a matter of decades, you don't see climate swings like that basically at all in all of earth history. Like, except for. Maybe the possibility of some of the mass extinction. So it really, it, it's a radical chemistry experiment. Um, we're running on the planet now and you really like, deep time really helps draw out just how radical it is.
Carlyle: Yeah, so you know relatively speaking, it’s only been pretty recently where we’ve been in kind of Goldilocks, levels, you know, where we need to, for the earth to be habitable.
Peter: Yeah. Well, for mammals to be happy. Yeah. But you know, w. Another thing I don't think people really appreciate is that the last two and a half million years have been really volatile, swings between ice ages and these brief little moments called Interglacials that only last a few millennia, which for me, talking about geology a lot, I, I consider a few millennia pretty short, um, where it gets warmer and ice retreats for a little bit, but then you go back into an ice age and uh, you know, we only emerged from the last ice age. 11,700 years ago, but, that's not that long ago. And before that, you're in this world where the sea level's 400 feet lower and it's a dry, dusty world. So we really made it through some hard times and some radical swings in climate. And we currently have this little break now where all of recorded history has happened in a really, like, almost eerily stable climate window, where it's been pretty warm and pretty nice.
And if we weren't around injecting gigatons of CO2 in the air, we'd probably be dropping back in on ice age at some point in the next few thousand years, which is, it's a good thing we didn't go down that trajectory. But the alternative, which is, you know, suddenly swinging in the other direction to an, to a climate that, uh, hasn't been seen for millions of years is also a pretty perilous path as well.
Carlyle: Yeah, and let's get to the kind of that moment where we. Hop on this perilous path. You, um, you write about, the beginning of the steam engine and industrial revolution and how this was like really a truly pivotal moment in, human history. That is still playing out, but so tell us, take us back to that big turning point and why it's so important.
Peter: Yeah. so humans, we're also powered by like carbon and turning it back into CO2,
Societies have always been powered by basically organic matter and how much you can grow on the surface of the planet, which really limits your ambition as a, as a society.
Carlyle: Wow. So it
Peter: And then, yeah.
Carlyle: that kind of put a check on growth is what you're saying.
Peter: Yes. so some of the first, you know, earliest British economists like, um, Adam Smith, uh, they thought there was this, you'd, you'd have these periods of, of growth, uh, where you know, everyone would benefit, but then you'd run outta land, food, feed everyone, and wages would go down, and then people would get miserable again.
And so there was this cycle and it was impossible to basically break out of it. And what changed is that you had a very much growth-minded, uh, society in Northern Europe, um, in England and the Dutch Republic as well. But in England, they had the benefit of sitting on top of the mother load of coal. all these deposits from this alien time in earth history, the carbonate first period.
And there was a long history of using coal in England for its heat. You can brew beer and you can make bread, and you can make soap and things, and there was a long history of that in England, but the steam engine really changed things because you could substitute human and animal labor. You could mechanize it and you could power it with all the energy ever buried in, in earth history. And so that just completely obliterated these limits to society that had ever existed or had always existed over human history. And the last couple centuries are kind of the result, like the, the planet's been totally transformed in, you know, some good ways, especially us in the West, we're, we're taller and healthier and live decades, longer than any, um, human in, human history.
but then obviously there are all these, uh, downsides.
So this is sort of a, I mean, it's a, it's a nuanced story. I think some people either, uh, gravitate towards one part of the story or the other where it's like, look at all the environmental destruction, all the exploitation that this enabled, or look at this incredible growth and all, all these improvements and just basic human measures of quality of life.
And both things are true. And so I try to keep those balance in the story that there's just no way you can detonate this basically all of earth's history buried under our feet in the form of fossil fuels. You do that in a couple centuries. There's no way, it's not gonna be like a chaotic transformational period in earth history.
Carlyle: Yeah, and I guess what your book did for me too is kind of highlight how radical what we're doing is. yeah, I think we kind of stop and think about that very often.
Peter: yeah. So I talk about these different analogs to events that have happened in earth history, but none of them are really perfect. And in some ways what we're doing is unprecedented in the entire age of animal life. So you have these.really crazy volcanic events that happen once every a hundred million years or so, like this thing called the Siberian Traps in Russia 252 million years ago, which caused the biggest mass extinction ever by putting lots of CO2 in the air, making it really hot. but that, that put more CO2 in the air than we ever could, even by burning all the false fuels. But it happened over tens of thousands of years.
And so even compared to that event, we're faster than that event. And that was literally the worst thing that ever happened in the age of animal life. So we're pushing on this thing, the carbon cycle, which is the reason why we're alive and why we're here harder than has ever happened.
And so that really is a scary thing. And as we try to figure out what our future's gonna look like, it's really kind of hazy just because we don't really have a history. Yeah, even in the fossil record of, of something like this happening before. So if anything that just, counsels caution where we don't know where this thing breaks, but we shouldn't really keep pushing it too much harder to find out.
Carlyle: So I wanted to also ask you about another part of this kind of delicate balance of carbon and this earth being habitable, which is the ocean. can you kind of explain the, simply the, the relationship between carbon and the ocean?
Peter: I mean if you look at a diagram of, of the carbon cycle just in the ocean, it is very, very complicated. and also kind of amazing. so you have a couple things going on. You have algae and plankton, these big huge blooms that you can see from space, these swirls, That are photosynthesizing and making plant matter in the ocean.
And then those feed the zooplankton, these little, you know, even smaller or slightly bigger things that are still microscopic. And then those feed the big fish. and then those, all that organic matters gently rains through the oceans and eventually makes it to the deep. And then you have things down there eating it.
And it's, all this stuff is being transported by huge ocean currents and, things are making. Shells outta carbonate, and that's ending up on the sea floor too. but I mean, that's where, that's where life started. We, our origins go back to the ocean.Most of what we know about Earth history is actually from the ocean. And I grew up near the ocean, so I definitely have a soft spot for it.
Carlyle: And so thinking about its role in kind of, keeping things in check the ocean has been, absorbing a lot of the CO2 that we've out there. Like a lot of it, most of it.
Peter: yeah. 30% I think. But as a result, the, it's become 30% more acidic. like I said. CO2 reacts to rainwater, makes more acidic. It also does that with ocean water. and we've just been putting so much up into the, into the air then, then that's diffused into the ocean that has caused ocean acidification, which so far hasn't been a huge problem for life.
Because life is very adaptable. But you know, you're already starting to see things like. Around the Southern Ocean in Antarctica and on the Pacific Northwest even. these things called terra pods, which are these little marine snails that make their shells out of, calcium carbonate.
They're starting to be like pitted with holes and these are kind of foundational to the food chain. So that's kind of another thing that keeps me up at night is you really don't wanna mess with the bottom of the food chain.
Carlyle: So, so we know, um, carbon dioxide is actually increasing in coastal waters in the gulf faster than in the open ocean. acidification is happening faster when we're thinking about our kind of. Backyard here on the Gulf Coast. What do those changes in that kind of, delicate balance that's, you know, carbon plays a big role in why are these changes concerning what's happening? Why are they concerning?
Peter: Yeah, I, I, I don't have to tell you guys like how important the fishing industry is to, to the Gulf Coast, like, acidification can affect like juvenile stages of, You know, fish and crustaceans and everything we love in the ocean. So yeah, we're kind of just turning this knob in one direction. and it's kind of amazing that none of these changes are, are, are kind of for the better. You know, we have this, I think, more delicate, you know, industrial society than we might think where we rely on all these different things, working together. And if you chip away at the food system or, if you're spending half your municipal budget rebuilding after every hurricane, then that's less money you can invest in the community.
So it's grim news. That's why I focus mostly on these really old rocks and these things from hundreds of millions of years ago.
Carlyle: hmm yeah so speaking of our delicate industrial society, something you write about is since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when we look at these big historical events, carbon is in the background. It’s been the driver of wars and geopolitics. Can you kind of pick out an example that's maybe the easiest to kind of show how carbon is the actual driver of these things?
Peter: Yeah, and I think my editor thought I was crazy when she read my first draft, when she's like, why are you writing about all this stuff? But I, but. The reason why is because you pull on this thread of carbon and it really does start to illuminate, you know, everything from earth history to human history.
In the book, I kind of linger on World War II, where sort of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were kind of doomed by their inability to acquire fossil fuel to power, power themselves. So, they both took these insane. gambits to, you know, in the case of Japan, to take it from Indonesia, which is one of the reasons why, you know, they wanted to decapitate the Pacific, fleet first before they did that.in the case of Germany, they, you know, they got some oil from Romania, but as soon as the US showed up on the scene, which was just a tsunami of oil, they were basically screwed unless they were able to capture the caucuses.And so both of those, you know, that that war, while it was fought for grand ideological reasons, also fundamentally revolved around, uh, you know, access to carbon.
Carlyle: Yeah, And it's also kind of worrying that power and carbon are kind of, connected inextricably. and kind of what that says for the future, if carbon and capitalism are that related, and like if you got the carbon, you're gonna win the wars.
Like how can we disconnect those two things that you have to have the carbon and burn it to be powerful or rich?
Peter: Yes. So fundamentally it is like an insight that access to energy improves quality of life. but that energy doesn't necessarily have to come from, from carbon. It has for the past few centuries, but we have this task in the next few decades, which is really a lot higher of a task than I think a lot of people appreciate, which is okay.
We've, in a matter of centuries, we've burned through a lot, a lot of the fossil record,500 million years of stored up energy. We just lit on fire all at once, and then in the next few decades, we somehow have to jump off that. Into an equivalent energy source that also, you know, if we're gonna keep growing, that has to become even bigger than this.
And so. A lot of really smart people around the world are applying themselves to this problem. countries like China are investing insane amounts in solar panels and EVs and doing this massive deployment, which is sort of, um, transforming their role in the global economy. but yeah, I think it's never gonna be the case that energy isn't important.
Energy, you know, you don't have life without energy
Carlyle: Yeah, so I guess if we're at this moment where we have a huge challenge. What have you learned by focusing on the whole story of carbon Or what does the story carbon tell us?
Peter: I think there's a couple things that, well, one, just the experience writing in the book made me incredibly grateful just to even be alive on this weird planet. all the things that had to happen for,for us to be having this conversation, it's just like mind blowing.
But then when you read about human history, especially human evolutionary history, we did live through swings in climate that were like six degrees or more.They were over thousands to tens of thousands of years. But, humans are nothing if not incredibly adaptable. And we've existed in so many different, you know, different kinds of social organization and we like, we have this thing culture and technology, which we can transmit. Through generations and with a written word. And so if any species, um, in earth history is gonna figure this out, it would be us. I just dunno what that looks like in the next few decades. But I guess that's my hope.
Carlyle: Yeah, and kind of the, I think that is also a part of this that I've really found fascinating is kind of reframing carbon from this kind of villainous thing to this wonder of life. So I guess maybe if we can finish on, reflecting on what, what carbon means to us and to life on earth, and, and maybe how that could, propel us to a better place.
Peter: Yes. I think if we have designs on becoming a long-term tenant of this planet. we're really not acting like it now. and I think,we'd benefit as a society if we. I came to appreciate this deep time sort of geological perspective, and how the planet acts over long stretches when it is, you know, pretty happy when things are going well.when these, huge planetary processes and geochemical cycles are finally unbalanced,that if we really want to stick around for a while, we need to learn how to. Become, you know, part of the earth system in a way that isn't, deranging it, uh, like the way we are now. And, I guess that's, that's my hope for the future. That once we live through this chaotic time in our lifetime as a species, then we'll come to appreciate what it takes to live on really long geological timescales and, um, living in a way where things aren't so outta balance.
Carlyle: Well, thank you so much, Peter. I, I think you succeeded in showing how the story of CO2. Literally the story of everything and, it was an amazing book and, and really fascinating conversation, so thank you.
Peter: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.
Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was hosted by me, Carlyle Calhoun. Editing help from Eva Tesfaye and Jack Rodolico. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and our sound designer is Dennis Funk. I’m the executive producer.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. And to help others find our podcast, hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.(OR: And to help others find our podcast, please share this episode with a friend!)
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux (Meer - O) Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
We’ll be back in two weeks.
