Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - From Drilled: The Carbon Gold Rush

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

We usually bring you failures of the past, but today we're sharing an episode from someone who uncovers failures as they happen. Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative climate journalist and the host of Drilled, a true-crime climate change podcast exposing how corporate corruption and political operatives built decades of climate denial and delay. Each season unravels new evidence of deception, disinformation, and the power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach. Drilled's latest season, Carbon Cowboys, examines a group of people who've turned climate policy into a profit engine. In September 2025, a group of Brazilian government ministers flew to North Dakota to watch a presentation on a new type of clean energy project, one that promised to help them deliver Brazilian President Lula’s dream of turning Brazil into “the Saudi Arabia of sustainable aviation fuels.” It was the latest in a string of projects from Midwest Republican kingmaker and corn ethanol magnate Bruce Rastetter, whose investments in Brazil might just transform him into a global carbon czar, even as his Summit pipeline carbon project faces fierce opposition from Iowa to North Dakota. Here's episode 1 of Drilled: Carbon Cowboys. Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts and hear episodes early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Sign up on the Drilled show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Hello, Tim Harford here, briefly stepping aside from my usual role of documenting failures of the past to point you towards someone who's uncovering spectacular failures as they happen. Her name is Amy Westervelt and her show is called Drilled. It's an investigative podcast about climate change, not the science of it, but the politics and the money and the spin. This season, Carbon Cowboys, follow. a new type of clean energy project in Brazil, one that promises to turn the country into,

quote, the Saudi Arabia of sustainable aviation fuels. What could possibly go wrong? It's the kind of story cautionary tales listeners will recognize, powerful people, a compelling vision, and some uncomfortable questions lurking just beneath the surface. Enjoy the episode, and if you want to hear more, find Drilled wherever you get your podcasts. And hear episodes early and ad-free with Pushkin Plus. Available on Drilled's Apple Podcasts show page or pushkin.fm slash plus. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. In early September 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials headed to North Dakota on a mission. It was a technical mission.

They were there to see a shiny new green technology in action. The idea behind this new technology was simple. When you turn corn into ethanol, it generates carbon dioxide. And that's a problem if you're trying to be a problem. if you're trying to be a green fuel. But now, people from Iowa to North Dakota were capturing that carbon dioxide, storing it, and selling it.

Never mind that they were selling it to people who would inject it underground to get more oil out. Some of it would surely still stay underground, and if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, that made it a climate solution. The American company selling the Brazilians on this idea, had a lot writing on these officials believing that carbon capture connected to ethanol

was a great green success story. Win-win for industry and the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil. But had the visiting bureaucrats scan the local newspapers, they might have found a different story. If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. You know, essentially paying him to capture CO2 at ethanol plants and then shipping it across private land and public land and then disposing of it somewhere many states away.

On September 2nd, the Brazilian contingent met with an Iowa company called Summit Carbon Solutions. Summit has been trying for years to build a carbon capture pipeline to connect dozens of ethanol plants from, Iowa to North Dakota. It's called the Midwest Carbon Express Project. Harold Hamm, who controls many of North Dakota's oil fields and is an energy advisor to President Trump, is a major investor in the company. Bruce Rastetter is the company's co-founder. He's also founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural Group. For all their cheerleading of the project to visitors, the Summit Pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks. In fact, it's managed to do what almost no politician issue or campaign has been able to do in the U.S.

for years, United Far Left and Far Right populace. People from both sides hate this pipeline. For Rastudder, it's not the first time he's faced opposition, especially in his home state of Iowa. Anyone who remotely followed politics or agriculture, you say Rastetter, you're going to get a response. Jess Missouri is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club Iowa. For Jess, the carbon pipeline was not the first time she dealt with Bruce Rastutter. They know who it is, and they go, oh, you know, that guy did this or that guy put a factory farm near my house or he's the one that, you know, got Iowa State in trouble. So I think everyone's got an opinion of him.

and he's really, really good at being able to avoid ever having to be in the public. He doesn't get interviewed. He doesn't take media requests. Kind of secretive. He lives out in the middle of nowhere in Hardin County, Iowa. Rastardustard got his start as a big hog farmer. From there, it wasn't a big leap to growing corn. And then, like a lot of corn growers, that led quickly to getting into the corn ethanol business.

As a long-time climate reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol green. Its carbon footprint is similar to regular oil gas. It requires around 30 times as much land as solar, plus lots of water and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. But industrial agriculture gets loads of subsidies from it, so they're always finding a way to keep it alive. And in 2022, Congress handed it its last. latest lifeline. The Inflation Reduction Act contains some really incredible things for our shareholders. It contains sustainable aviation fuel. We think that's an incredible part of decarbonizing the planet. The Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's big climate policy, created a whole new

revenue stream for the corn ethanol guys. Now they could sell to airlines, but only if they embraced carbon capture. Bruce Rastetter to the rescue. So I think without continuing to attain new markets, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy. So that's what lowering carbon scores, this project on the pipeline, is about with 34 ethanol plants across the upper Midwest, but in particular, Iowa. Summit Carbon Solutions still talks about the project today as a way to open up new markets for Iowa corn farmers. So the company was caught off guard when people across multiple states begin. organizing against the Midwest Carbon Express. And it quickly became a big problem because Rastetter was not just the ethanol kingpin of Iowa.

His company was also the majority owner of a Brazilian ag company, FS fueling sustainability. And he'd helped to make corn ethanol a thing in Brazil too. Now Summit is trying to make carbon capture happen there too. Welcome to Drilled Season 15, Carbon Capital Capital. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this season we've partnered with the amazing reporters at the Intercept Brazil to learn more about what Rastetter is doing down there. I'm Philippe Sabrina with the Interceptor Brazil. I will be hosting the Portuguese version of the season over on the Interceptive Brazil feed.

This is a story about how the Ethanol King of Iowa became the King of Corn in Brazil. And how a bunch of ideas that are great for the oil and ag industries got rebranded. as climate solutions and created a carbon gold rush. A few months ago, Felipe started telling me about this giant giant pig statue that greets people near Bruce Rastutter's home base in Brazil. Because yes, his partners in Brazil also started out as pig farmers. These guys are all still on the pig business and boy, do they love pigs. When Felipe sent me a picture of this pig statue, I don't know.

I was kind of shook. If you're imagining some sort of tasteful bronze statue, think again, this is a massive, quirky pig-looking thing, wearing Lederhosen and a bright green hat holding a corn cob. And it even has a name, Lukina or Little Lucas, because the town is called Lucas de Rio Verde. It tells you actually a lot about this place. It was proposed by one of the largest landowners in the area, big agriculture. He comes from a German family, which is why the pig is wearing a German outfit. Around 50 years ago, the Brazilian agriculture industry came to this place looking for a cheap and easy land grab. Today, the American agriculture industry is doing the same thing.

You are in Lucas-D-Rew-Verde, the city of opportunities. Here, a generation of empergos and the quality of life see-in-counter. to with the epic background music is from a promotional video by the Lucas Torio Verje city government highlighting the wonders of the city. The video mixes images of macaws, forests in the sunset, and large cotton, soybean, and cornfields. The city government wants you to know that Lucas is the city of opportunities. It has more than 95,000 inhabitants and produces more than 2 million tons of green per year. The narrator of the video says, We are one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil, and then the screen fills with a mix of smiling children, crops, and grain pouring out of machines.

Lucas de Rio Verje is all money, growth, and seas of corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see. The first time I visited, it shocked me to see massive crops right next to people's homes. But the more I learned about Lucas, the more it made sense. The town is a fiction. designed and built by the government to impose development on this region. Lucas was entirely created to serve agriculture and its owners. The wide avenues are lined with silos, agricultural machinery stores, supply stores, credit banks, and real estate agencies. Trucks over 20 meters long, loaded with soybeans or corn, have plenty of space to drive around or park on the curb.

Walking in Lucas, on the other hand, is a challenge because of the distances between the long avenues, the heat and the lack of trees to provide shade. The city is obsessed with imperial palm trees. There are hundreds of them in the town center and on the sides of the roads. With nothing but monoculture crops and imported palm trees, there is no vegetation in the area to insulate it from extremist. temperature changes. Lucas can go from freezing cold to unbelievably hot from one moment to the next. It was weird for me, but the people I spoke with here didn't seem to mind. The image of abundant harvests has drawn people from all over the country to Lucas.

My husband was unemployed for two years. Then we saw a report about the city, which is a very good place to live, to rate. children, even in terms of violence. So we pack no bags. Isabella is from Minas de Reis, a Brazilian state southeast of Lucas. But since 2021, she's been living here with her husband and children. She sells assayibles in front of the parking lot of a multinational grain company. Asailles is a fruit typical of the Amazon. Isabella buys it from suppliers and sells it to truck drivers who load and unload grain here. She passes small bowls of assay cream through the fence and the truckers pass back cash.

Isabella said Lucas is great, not least because when she needs to take her kids to a public hospital, she never waits more than an hour to be seen. Me in the city? I don't think anyone can complain about health care. She says the Lucas de Rio Verde Hospital, Sa Lucas, in particular, is especially nice. It's run today by a partnership between the city and agribusiness entrepreneurs. Now they've opened a really nice word, too. The whole hospital has been renovated.

In fact, the new maternity award at the South Lucas Contarach with a new ala, the center materno-infantil. video too. And a few seconds into it, listeners might recognize a not-so-Brazilian-sounding name. Bruce Rastetter, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. He wields a lot of power there, but outside the state, he's not exactly a household name. Now suddenly a new wing in the hospital and this Brazilian farm town was being named after this guy. How did that happen? The hospital canceled my tour just before I arrived. So our producer Marcia Révedos and I just showed up to see what we could see.

We talked to a hospital worker in the hallway. It's a little hard to hear there because Felipe and Marcia were trying to tape with their phone, and of course she's speaking in Portuguese too. But when they asked her about the name of the ward, the Bruce Rastatter Wing, she said it was named after Bruce, a doctor from Ohio. We're still not sure where she got that idea. But funding big public projects, especially around hospitals and healthcare, is really common in Brazil. You just heard how, when telling Philippi about what she likes about Lucas, Isabella mentioned healthcare. People think of hospitals as an example. People think of hospitals as an example of how nice a city is or how well it's working. So if Lucas has a good hospital,

no one can say that the politicians or the businessmen running things here are bad. That goes double for anything that's focused on women and children. So a maternity ward checks a lot of boxes. And then we found out that the hospital is run by a foundation led by one of Rastetter's Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz. Marino's brother Paolo, was the one that proposed that giant pig statue that looks out over Lucas. And to understand how Rastudder, the American farmer, ended up with a Brazilian rural maternity ward named after him. We had to figure out how the Franz brothers fit into it. And what brought Bruce to Brazil in the first place?

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Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's Iheartadvertising.com. Lucas de Rio Verde is in the Brazilian state of Matagroso, a state that is almost exactly half agriculture and half Amazon. rainforest. It used to be even more Amazon. For decades, the state was considered the frontier in Brazil. The forests were preserved and it was home to even more indigenous people than it is today.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil's military government deployed a new strategy. It was called the National Integration Plan. The idea was to eliminate indigenous communities that were seen as anti-development and integrate the north and Midwest of Brazil into the national economy. This revolution the jungle. This argument of tombas a story

very different of the 70s, celebrates the quote, revolution reaching the jungle, toppling trees

in favor of roads. The goal was to develop the Amazon by building infrastructure in the wilderness, displacing indigenous

residents and encouraging people from outside the region to move there. to be pioneers and go to this frontier and tame it. The main farm towns in Motogroso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them built and funded by the Brazilian government. The government offered people lots of land, housing, and sometimes even credit to move there.

They even funded research to figure out how crops like soybeans and cotton could be grown in the tropical climate there. That's what brought the Franz brothers there decades ago. And according to Paolo, it's the Franz brothers who brought Bruce to the area. In Paolo's telling, it all happened because of an internship he did in Iowa and an important contact he made there. Here he is talking about it on a Brazilian podcast. We see to play football together. We see almost every year.

Terry Branstad. Terry Brantzad, the governor of Iowa at the time. And eventually, U.S. Ambassador. to China during Trump's first presidency. Powell says they all went to soccer games together a lot. Powell says it was Brandstad, who introduced him to Bruce Rastetter. Bruce is the CEO of the company, the founder. He has a huge passion for pigs and has been involved with pigs his whole life.

He was a pig farmer until he started getting into ethanol, which is a very recent thing. I don't know whether, just to clarify, Americans produce more ethanol from corn than we do from sugar cane. There, the philosophy, the culture is producing ethanol from corn. So as president, I met with his Terry Brandstad, who was the governor of Iowa. We met and he wanted to buy some land here in Brazil. Bruce doesn't mention any of this when he's asked about how he wound up in Brazil. Here's how he talked about it on a farming podcast a couple of years ago. So when we sold Hawkeye to Coke Industries, that was one of his ethanol companies.

That freed me up for the first time to do other things outside of being responsible for a larger company and started traveling to Brazil. This is how Bruce talks about it in other interviews too. He was interested in Brazil because it's the main agricultural competitor to the U.S. Or because other U.S. companies had done well there, et cetera, et cetera. It was when we were trying to verify Bruce and Paolo's differing versions of this story that our Brazil editor, Alisi Dasuzza, found a guy with yet another version. Is this pro-est and all? Are you three-hackers? Are you looking at this from a negative standpoint?

Or are you looking at it from a neutral standpoint? I don't mind being neutral. I can be critical of this too. Yeah. But I'm, because clients of mine have invested in upwards of a billion dollars now in my progrosso, I don't want to fuck this up. That's Corey Melby, an agriculture consultant in Brazil. I came from Northwest Minnesota developing land. So, of course, when in the early 2000s, when Macbrogrozo and all of this soybean expansion was taking place,

I was going to be the land guy for a group from some of the first guys I went down with. You're going to be here. Corey, pick up the language, make up the contacts. You could be the real estate guy. So that's where I started was from that perspective. Full disclosure, we paid Corey Melody to be a fixer for us on the ground in Matto Grosso. The idea was that he would take us around and ideally arrange a meeting with the brothers' friends at their farm. None of that ended up panning out, but he did talk to Philippi and I, and he told us a lot about

how Bruce started out in Brazil. He also added me to his newsletter list, which is a wealth of acknowledge about Brazil. Although it comes out so many times a week, I still have about 500 unread emails in a folder marked Corey. So I've been on every farm in my bro, so I wrote the boom times and the bus

and the boom times and the bus again with all my friends. So I have that 25-year archive experience. now of the good, bad, and ugly of Makro Grosso. And believe me, there's plenty of all of it. He knows a lot about Bruce and the Franz brothers because he did for Bruce what he's done for the past 25 years for other Americans looking to get into the ag business in Montegrozzo. He toured them around looking for land.

Back in 2011, I was visiting Luribat, and he was a young dynamic guy. And he would say, Corey, we're looking to develop a co-op. a corn oil mill processing. And investors or partner in that, corn oil. So I was writing about this BS in my newsletters at the time and also visiting him Lucas deil Verde at the elevators at the time, Dr. McCormers.

Oh, corn ethanol, corn ethanol, we got to get corn ethanol there, or we're going to bury ourselves. Because of his newsletter and his ties to various American acts, folks, Corey has kind of become known as the guy to call if you're an American who wants to give a sense of Matto Grosso. So when people started talking about corn ethanol there, it was only a matter of time before you got a call from You Know Who. Summit from Iowa, which I'm sure you are very familiar with Bruce Rastetter and Eric and the whole club. I get a call from Bruce's letter or email. Hey, we would like a tour of Marco Grosso. We're going to be down there for another reason.

Could we do something all the cart with you, Cory? They didn't want to take one of Corey's pre-packaged ag tours. Okay. So this is 2011. We do a little quick hour to tour. They go home. I figured out just another tour. We were looking at land.

Corey carried on, thinking nothing of it. But six months or so later, he got a call from some friends in Monte Grosso. My good friend, the friends is, you know, they were, Corey. We want to get an ethanol now going out here. But we need help. We need American. We need capital, et cetera, et cetera. So I was telling Bruce and the guys at the time, you know, I've got friends that I'm going to get into the ethanol.

That's why I guys. According to Corey, at the time, Bruce and the guys weren't quite ready to get into the ethanol business in Brazil. They were just looking for some farmland. Then they came back for another trip, and as Corey tells it, this is when they met the Franzes. All of a sudden, you know, Brazilian is being Brazil, we got a farm for sale. Corey helped broker the deal between Bruce and the Franzes, and it kept them all talking. Three years to tolls on this damn farm. But that farm purchase then opened the door with trust and capable, hey, let's build an ethanol mill and Lucas together.

The Franz brothers had hit the big time. They were getting into business with the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. It was a whole new level, whereas Corey calls it cycle three. Cycle one is deforestation in cattle. Cycle two is soil. Cycle 2.5 is soy corn, basically, you know, the combination. cycle three now is to be what we would say industrial or added value, no different than Iowa. For the Franz brothers, Bruce was a white whale.

At a time of booming Brazilian industrial agriculture, he happened to have some free time on his hands. And now this international king of corn had picked them. What luck. But that story misses one important detail. At the time he was doing land tours in Brazil, Bruce Rastudder was having a really bad time back home in Iowa. Since 2012, since that big land grab attempt in Africa, he has become a dirty word in Iowa. It's just that's what he does. It's like his business model, you know.

And whether it was in Iowa with, you know, how he was treating Iowa farmers or now it's globally. Yeah, he just keeps pushing his business advancement. right? It's all about his corporate profits. Friends of friends have said that he's kind of over Iowa and more interested in Brazil, which I mean, I suppose if I was in his shoes, if I had the choice of, you know, being a place where everybody hated me and a place where people fond over me, I'd probably go to lots of people fond over me. That's our story next time.

We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Hamm, the Franz Brothers, Miguel Gauze-Robero, and all summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment and have incorporated any responses we received throughout the season. Carbon Cowboys, Cowboys of the Serrado, is a collaboration between Dilled and the Interceptive Brazil. The show was reported and written by Felipe Sabrina and me, Amy Westervelt. Our editors are Audrey Queen in the U.S. and Alice de Sosa in Brazil. Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoltz-Austwick. Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Heave.

Gerdosa and Philippi Mooks. Theme song and original music by Eric Terena. Additional music by Martin Zaltz Ostwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff. Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming. U.S. fact-checking from Naomi Bar. Brazil fact-checking by Studio Frontera. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project.

We are also proud members of Reporter Shield. Big thanks also to Andrew Fishman, president of the Interceptional. Brazil. Drilled is distributed by Pushkin Industries. Huge thanks to the team there, including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Shreberneck, and Jake Flanagan. To hear the Portuguese version of this series, head over to the Intercept Brazil's site or search for the Intercept Brazil's podcast feed wherever you listen to podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human