Welcome to Carbon Cowboys
5/5/20264 min
For decades we’ve heard that “the markets” will solve the climate crisis. On Drilled: Carbon Cowboys, we put that theory to the test, following Bruce Rastetter, a corn ethanol kingpin-turned-carbon entrepreneur from Iowa to Brazil, and asking the big questions: Are these “climate solutions” actually reducing emissions? Is CO2 increasing or decreasing as carbon becomes a commodity? Or is green colonialism just as extractive as the regular sort?
Drilled: Carbon Cowboys begins on April 21. Pushkin+ subscribers can hear episodes early and ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAmy Westervelt· Host0:00
[music] Pushkin. [music] In 2011, Bruce Rastetter headed down to Brazil. He was not just another Midwest tourist headed to the Amazon. Bruce had pioneered factory farming in Iowa, and then done the same for biofuels and this thing called carbon capture. He's a big Republican donor, too. So he went to Brazil looking for land.
Bruce Rastetter· Soundbite0:36
So we met with a lot of larger farmers. Went from Bahia to Tocantins to Mato Grosso.
Amy Westervelt· Host0:42
And he flew down with a team of executives. They said they were gonna help the country get in on a gold rush.
Bruce Rastetter· Soundbite0:49
[music] Carbon and its derivatives are gonna be really the next great commodity that the globe’s gonna trade. It's a huge opportunity, but we won't qualify unless we lower our carbon intensity scores.
Amy Westervelt· Host1:02
Over the last couple of decades, climate regulators have worked hard to incentivize green energy solutions, and Bruce Rastetter knows better than anyone how to take advantage of something like that. He's gotten huge government kickbacks by pivoting from growing corn to making corn ethanol, and now he's helping the ethanol industry get paid for capturing their carbon emissions.
Speaker 2· Soundbite1:27
So this Republican kingmaker