[MUSIC]
Pushkin. [MUSIC]
“In 2011, Bruce Rasteader 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 on this thing called carbon capture. He's a big Republican donor, too, so he went to Brazil looking for land. [MUSIC] So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tokotins to Montagroso.
And he flew down with a team of executives. They said they were going to help the country get in on a gold rush. [MUSIC]
Carbon and derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe can
trade. It's a huge opportunity, but we won't qualify unless we lower our carbon and south sea scores. Over the last couple of decades, climate regulators have worked hard to incentivize green energy solutions. And Bruce Rasteader 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.
So this Republican kingmaker is planning on this get-rich scheme of us 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. For the last 10 years, Bruce and his Brazilian company, FSB, and Eurgea have been pushing corn ethanol and carbon capture in Brazil. You've been helping to draft Brazilian regulations around it. [INAUDIBLE]
FS is promoting regulation, pioneering, perspecting, and even growing on the experience of its partners in the United States. Now, corn ethanol production and carbon capture are so big in Brazil. They're at the top competitor to the US. But trouble back home is threatening to topple Bruce's whole carbon empire.
“Because here's the thing, corn ethanol has never been a climate solution.”
And the idea of capturing carbon, it's kind of a joke. It's a waste stream, person for most. And any policies that incentivize its uptake and use, risk incentivizing an increase in its production. Once that carbon gets captured, oil companies send a most of it underground to extract even more oil so we can burn even more fossil fuels and create more emissions.
They get paid to get the CO2. They're in a profiting, getting CO2 of the ground. And then they can use it to get well out of the ground and earn a profit on the oil too. By the time Bruce got to Brazil, the people of Iowa were on to him. The rank of file folks in the grounds in the Midwest can't get this one big scam in the other farm else on the ground and also think it's a scam.
Today, Bruce and the world are at a tipping point.
“Will Carbon be a commodity traded on the markets divorced entirely from its role as a pollutant?”
Or will we choose a different path? Welcome to Season 15 of Drilled Carbon Cowboys. The story of the ethanol kingpin of Iowa, who became the king of corn and Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. This season is a collaboration between Drilled and the Intercept Brazil. You can get the Portuguese version over on the Intercept
Brazil's feed. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
