This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

One of the best parts for me about hosting Reveal,

you know, your favorite weekly investigative podcast, is the interviews.

I love to sit down with people and try to gain a perspective that gives me and our listeners

a new way of seeing the world, which is why we're launching more to the story with me,

Al Ledzen. It's a place where I can talk to some of the most intriguing people to bring some

context to our changing world. Follow the reveal podcast feed and look for more to the story

every Wednesday.

Pushkin. Day. In 2015, in 2015, Western Indonesia and Singapore were covered in toxic black smoke.

I had family living in Singapore and they couldn't breathe for months.

It was just billowing black beet smoke.

Tim Sirai is a climate policy expert at Johns Hopkins.

We talked to him last episode.

Like everyone else, living in Singapore at the time, his family was living

in hazy smoke for months. The culprit wasn't a forest fire. It was, well, in a way,

kind of everything we've been talking about this season. The U.S. had passed laws incentivizing

corn ethanol. So all the corn that used to be used for corn oil in cooking

was being used for ethanol instead. The world needed a replacement for cheap cakes and cookies,

and it found it in palm oil. Throughout the early 2000s, much of the rainforests of Borneo

were replaced with palm oil plantations.

And plantation owners would use fire to quickly clear the rainforest.

...