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 follows 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 caution me tales. Listeners will recognize powerful people, the compelling vision,
some uncomfortable questions looking 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 podcast show page or pushkin dot fm, slash plus.
In early September twenty twenty five, 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 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 in the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil. But had the visiting bureaucrats scanned 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 CO two at ethanol plants and then shipping it across private land and public land and then disposing of it somewhere many states away.
On September second, 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 plands from Iowa to North Dakota. It's called the Midwest Carbon Express Project. Harold Ham, 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 a founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural Group. For other cheerleading of the project to visitors, the Summit pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks. In fact, it's man to do almost no politician, issue or campaign has been able to do in the US for years. United far left and far right populous
people from both sides hate this pipeline. For Rest Utter, it's not the first time he's faced opposition, especially in his home state of Iowa.
Anyone who remotely follows politics or agriculture, you say raft Stetter you're going to get a response.
Jess Mazur is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club Iowa. For Jess, the carbon pipeline was not the first time she'd dealt with Bruce Rastutter.
They know who it is, and they go, oh, you know that guy did this, So 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 secret if.
He lives out in the middle of nowhere in Hardin County, Iowa.
Rastutter 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 longtime climate reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol green.
Its carton footprint is similar to regular gas. It requires around thirty 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 twenty twenty two, Congress handed it its 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 the carbonizing the planet.
The Infletion Reduction Act, Biden's big climate policy, created a whole new revenue stream for the corn ethmol guys. Now they could sell to airlines, but only if they embraced carbon capture. Bruce Restetter to the rescue, so.
I think without continuing to attain new markets, the ethanol industries in jeopardy. So that's what lowering carbon scores. This project on the pipeline is about, with thirty four 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 began organizing against the Midwest Carbon Express and it quickly became a big problem because Restetter was not just the ethanol kingpin of 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 some it is trying to make carbon capture happen there too. Welcome to Drilled Season fifteen, Carbon Cowboys. I'm Amy Westervelt and this season we've partnered with the amazing reporters of the Intercept Brazil to learn more about what Rasstutter is doing down there.
I'm Filippe Sabrina with the Interceptor Brazil. I will be hosting the Portuguese version of the season over on the Intercept to Brazil Feed. This is a story about how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil and.
How a bunch of ideas that are great for the oil and EG industries got rebranded as climate solutions and created a carbon gold rush.
Think Magannin as a gun Chi, think poru you can siders.
A few months ago, Philippe started telling me about this 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 Philippe sent me a picture of this pig statue, I was kind of shook. If you're imagining some sort
of tasteful bronze statue, think again. This is a massive, orky pig looking thing wearing laterhosen and a bright green hat holding a corn cob.
And it even has a name Lukeinya or Little Lucas because the town is called Lucas do hill Viji. It tells you actually a lot about this place. It was proposed by one of the largest landowners in the area, big agriculture business guy. He comes from a German family, which is why the pig is wearing German outfit. Around fifty 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.
Vusista in Lucas dou virgi asiddajijiu portunidajis aki ajira soujin pri guzia quali dan did you leave the same kotre. This audio you're listening to with the epic background music is from a promotional video by the Lucas Dorio Verge city government highlighting the wonders of the city. The video mixes imagism, macause forests and 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 ninety five thousand inhabitants and produces more than two 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 green pouring out of machines. Lucas to Rio Verge 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 twenty 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 important palm trees, there is no vegetation in the area to insulate it from extreme 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, all right, So.
Yeah, yeah, I think My husband was unemployed for two years. Then we saw reports about the city, which is a very good place to leave to raise children, even in terms of violence, so we packed all backs.
Isabella is from minaster Ice, a Brazilian state southeast of Lucas, but since twenty twenty one she's been living here with her husband and children. She sells Asai e bowls in front of the parking lot of a multi national grain company. Asai 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 asai 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 that Lucas, the rio Verge hospital saw 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 that to the ome hospital has been renovated.
Apart, I supposed Lucas Pontaka at Central Materni for Chu, who is passed by properson Resistencia Judus.
In fact, the new maternity ward at the saw Lucas Hospital has a promotional video too, and a few seconds into it, listeners might recognize a not so Brazilian sounding name.
North American Bruce Hast.
Bruce Rasttter, 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 in this Brazilian farm town was being named after this guy. How did that happen?
In the hospital canceled my tour just before I arrived, so our producer Marca Hever does 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 Philippe 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 rast at her 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 Philippe about what she likes about Lucas, Isabella mentioned healthcare. 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 Rasstutter's Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz. Marino's brother Paulo was the one that proposed that giant pig statue that looks out over Lucas. And to understand how Rastutter, 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. That's gonna yet after the break. Lucas de Rio Verde is in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, 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 nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, Brazil's military government deployed a new strategy
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 level. Jega seldom sada Arrigitomba is grab you right, Staudia plenty s antitas people on that level of community. This propaganda film from the seventies 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 tainment. The main farm towns in Monto Grosso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them
built and funded by the Brazilian government. The government offered people plots 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 follows 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.
Borjum end norm senor to Terry.
Branstead Terry Brandstad, the governor of Iowa at the time and eventually US Ambassador to China during Trump's first presidency. Pallas says they all went to soccer games together a lot. Pallis it was Brandstad who introduced him to Bruce Rastetter.
Bruce Keo, CEO of the Empires and Fundador.
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 sugarcane. There the philosophy, the culture is producing ethanol from corn. So as President I met with is Terry Branstad, 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 we 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 US, or because other US 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 Desusa, found a guy with yet another version.
Is this prooss and all are you three? Acres. Are you looking at this from a nakedness standpoint or are you you're 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 offers of a billion dollars now in marpro Grosso. 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 two thousands, when Mapa Grosso and all of this Siebian expansion was taking place, I was going to be the lamb 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, bick 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 Melby to be a fixer for us on the ground in Manto Grosso. The idea was that he would take us around and ideally arrange a meeting with the brothers Franz at their farmended 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 five hundred unread emails in a folder marked Corey.
So I've been on every firement by Grosso. I wrote the Boom Times and the bus, and the Boom Times and the Bus again with all my friends. So you know, I have that twenty five year art of experience now of the good, bad and ugly of micro Grosso, and believe me, there's plenty of all of it.
He knows a lot about Bruce and the Frownz brothers because he did for Bruce what he's done for the past twenty five years for other Americans looking to get into the agg business. In Monte Grosso. He toured them around looking for land.
Back in twenty eleven, I was visiting before you but and he was a young, dynamic guy, and he would say, Cory, we'll we're looking to develop a corn oil mill processing and investors or a partner in that.
Corn oil.
So I was writing about this BS and my newsletters at the time and also visiting him Lucas Deomerday at the elevators at the time, doctor to Climber's. Oh, cor we got to get corn ethanol or we're going to purry ourselves.
Because of his newsletter and his ties to various American agg folks, Corey has kind of become known as the guy to call if you're an American who wants to get a sense of Manto grosso. So when people started talking about corn ethanol there, it was only a matter of time before he got a call from you know who, Summit.
From Iowa, which I'm sure you are very familiar with, Bruce rest letter and Eric then.
The whole club.
I get all from Bruce's email. Hey, we were like a tour of man Cross. Uh, we're going to be down there for another reason. Could could we do something?
Call up cart with you.
They didn't want to take one of Corey's prepackaged ad tours.
Okay, so this is twenty eleven. We do a little quick power to here they go home. I figured out just another tour. Uh, we're looking at land. We love to get going on.
Corey carried on thinking nothing of it, but six months or so later he got a call from some friends in Manto.
Crussol my good friend.
The friends is you know, they were Cory. We we want to get an earthenhol now went out here, but we needed help. We need American, we need capital.
So I was telling.
Bruce and the guys, you know, I've got friends. I'm thinking at 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 Franzis all all of.
A sudden, we've got a farm for sale.
Corey helped broker the deal between Bruce and the Franzas, and it kept them all talking.
Three years on this down farm.
But that farm for just then opened the door with dressed and capable Hey, let's let's build an ethano though 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 song cycle two.
Point five is so corn.
Basically the combination CYCLEEL three now gets to be what we would say industrial or added value 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 Rastutter was having a really bad time back home in Iowa.
Since twenty twelve, 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, I saw 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 issues, if I had the choice of, you know, being at a place where everybody hated me in a place where people fond over me, I'd probably go to the people fond over me.
That's our story. Next time. We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Hamm, the Frownz Brothers, Miguel Das Ribero, 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 Off the Sejadu is a collaboration between Drilled and The Intercept to Brazil.
The show was reported and written by Philippe Sabrina and me Amy Westervelt.
Our editors are Audrey Queen in the US and Alisa Desoulza in Brazil.
Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Austwick. Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Heberdoza and Philippe MOOKX.
Theme song and original music by Eric Dana.
Additional music by Martin Saltz Ostwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff.
Artwork for Drild is by Matt Fleming.
US fact checking from Naomi bar Brazil.
Fact checking by Istujo Frontea.
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 Intercept Brazil.
DRILLD is distributed by Pushkin Industries.
Huge thanks to the team there, including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Rattner, 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.
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