Industrial agriculture has wrapped itself in a green cloak in Mato Grosso, promising jobs, money and endless opportunities, all in the name of "sustainability." But the good times are only happening for a select few. Local residents are dealing with extreme weather, lack of access to fresh food, and a pesticide overload that has increased the risk of birth defects and lowered lifespans. Meanwhile, Bruce and the guys have now ventured into new territory: the Amazon.

This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil. You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well, and companion stories at: https://www.intercept.com.br/

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Bruce's Brazilian business partners run the state of Mato Grosso and the town the company is headquartered in. So while he fights endless pushback to his pipeline project in Iowa, business in Brazil is booming. This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil.

You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well, and companion stories at: https://www.intercept.com.br/

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Bruce's venture in Brazil isn't the first time he tried to go global. What an earlier attempt tells us about him, his business, and what's ahead for both Iowa and "the Brazilian Midwest."

This season is a collaboration with the Intercept Brasil. You can get the show in Portuguese on their feed as well, and companion stories at: https://www.intercept.com.br/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As his American company Summit Carbon Solutions struggles with backlash to a carbon capture pipeline linking corn ethanol plants across the Midwest, Bruce Rastetter is not slowing down. Instead, he’s celebrating some big wins for his Brazilian company, FS Fueling Sustainability, from new ethanol-friendly climate policy to government funding for their carbon capture project.

Pushkin+ subscribers can hear episodes early and ad-free. Find Pushkin+ on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

Additional resources:

The link between corn ethanol and deforestation

Peer-reviewed research on the climate problems associated with corn ethanol 

An explainer on BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration) 

Reading list on enhanced oil recovery (EOR) 

Read more about the Summit Pipeline project

Carbon Herald on the push to connect Midwest ethanol plants to carbon capture 

Brazilian government document on technical mission to US midwest 

Travel schedule of Brazilian government officials while in the Midwest 

Read more about the explosion of corn ethanol in Brazil: https://drilled.media/news/ethanol-story1

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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 May 12th. 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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The U.S. invasions of Venezuela and Iran are more of the same imperialism in service of oil majors. As the climate crisis makes its presence more urgently felt, fossil fascism dictates a doubling-down on extraction and colonialism, and the vilification of those who oppose or stand in the way of that plan.

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Repression of protest has ramped up in the U.S., but everything that's happening now began with the backlash to the Standing Rock protest back in 2016. In today's episode we look at the connections between fossil fascism, petromasculinity, and protest.

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Lots of people are talking about the similarities between Iraq and Iran, but in this episode we place the two in the context of another war—World War I—and the historical arc of fossil fascism.

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What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines?

Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power but imperial power. They are building empires. And as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, particularly the old-fashioned kind: of labor, energy, minerals, land, water.

Seemingly overnight, tech elites’ feel-good climate promises have evaporated, having been seamlessly swapped for slippery promises that so-called “artificial general intelligence” will save the planet for us. Never mind that AGI is a fantastical concept that has no agreed-upon definition, or that, more fundamentally, it appears nowhere close to existing. In Big Tech’s frenzied pursuit of the “hyperscale” AI dominance that evangelists claim will unlock AGI, as well as its expanding alliances with fossil fuel-backed petrostates and authoritarian political movements, the industry has become an increasingly central contributor to the climate crisis.

In an October conversation with Drilled, Hao discussed how Silicon Valley giants appear to be following the oil and gas industry’s playbook of disinformation and deceit; how Altman and OpenAI’s secrecy and disingenuous rhetoric transformed the field of AI research into corporate PR; and why the destructive trajectory of AI scale and commercialization is not inevitable—no matter what its power-hungry proponents would have you believe.

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This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the hired hit that took Berta Cáceres’s life and robbed both the Honduran and global environmental movements of a uniquely effective leader. Cáceres was targeted by a dam company, with an assist from the police, military, government officials and international banks because of her effective organizing on behalf of her people, the Lenca. Nina Lakhani literally wrote the book on Cáceres’s killing, and in this episode she walks us through what happened then, what’s happening now, the role the U.S. played in all of it, and what Americans can learn from the way Honduran activists continue to show up in the face of violent repression.

Read Nina’s story 

Read Nina’s book

Check out Berta’s organization, Copinh

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Fernanda Hopenhaym, member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights walks Drilled senior global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani through the many legal pitfalls companies getting involved in the United States seizure of the Venezuelan oil industry might be facing.

Check out the longer story on our website.

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