Introducing Drilled: Carbon Cowboys
Hot Money: Agent of Chaos
Pushkin Industries & Financial Times
4.6 • 619 Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Drilled is a true-crime climate change podcast exposing how corporate corruption and political operatives built decades of climate denial and delay. Hosted and reported by award-winning investigative climate journalists, led by Amy Westervelt, each season unravels new evidence of deception, disinformation, and the power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach.
In September 2025, a group of Brazilian ministers trekked all the way to chilly North Dakota to see 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. The problem? It all requires loads of land and none of it does a thing about climate change.
Here's episode 1 of Drilled: Carbon Cowboys. Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:05.2 | Some crimes are so shocking. |
| 0:07.2 | They don't just make headlines. |
| 0:08.8 | They forever change our society. |
| 0:10.9 | I'm Katie Ring, host of America's most infamous crimes. |
| 0:14.2 | Each week, I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases. |
| 0:17.6 | Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, release every Tuesday through Thursday, from the first time that something was wrong, to the moment the truth came out or didn't. |
| 0:26.9 | Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. |
| 0:40.7 | Pushkin. |
| 0:43.4 | Hey listeners, Amy here. |
| 0:45.2 | I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of the new season of my |
| 0:49.1 | podcast Drilled. |
| 0:50.4 | As a long-time climate journalist, I've been hearing for at least 20 years that the markets will solve climate change. |
| 0:56.8 | On this season of drilled, we look at where that approach has landed us following an ethanol, kingpin, and carbon entrepreneur from Iowa to Brazil, and asking, is this really helping anything? |
| 1:09.3 | I hope you enjoy it. |
| 1:10.2 | And if you do, find drilled carbon cowboys wherever you listen to your podcasts. |
| 1:15.1 | Pushkin Plus subscribers can hear episodes early and ad free. |
| 1:18.8 | Sign up on the drilled show page on Apple or pushkin.fm slash plus. |
| 1:38.2 | In early September 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials headed to North Dakota on a mission. |
| 1:46.7 | 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. |
| 1:53.8 | And that's a problem if you're trying to be a green fuel. But now, people from Iowa to North Dakota |
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