Welcome to Carbon Cowboys | From Drilled
Against the Rules with Michael Lewis
Pushkin Industries
4.4 • 9.9K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Drilled, a new addition to the Pushkin network, is a true-crime climate change podcast exposing how corporate corruption and political operatives built decades of climate denial and delay. Award-winning investigative journalist Amy Westervelt unravels evidence of deception, disinformation, and the power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach. Her new season, Carbon Cowboys, traces how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil. 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 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. Find more of Drilled: Carbon Cowboys wherever you get podcasts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.6 | On big lives, we take a single cultural icon. |
| 0:07.6 | People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, little Richard. |
| 0:10.6 | And we pull apart the story behind the image. |
| 0:14.1 | And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives. |
| 0:18.1 | Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. |
| 0:23.1 | We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. |
| 0:27.4 | I'm Immanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. |
| 0:31.3 | Listen to Big Lives, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:42.9 | Thank you. Pushkin. |
| 0:46.8 | Hey, listeners, Amy here. |
| 0:51.8 | I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of the new season of my podcast drilled. |
| 0:55.1 | As a longtime climate journalist, I've been hearing for at least 20 years that the markets will solve climate change. On this season of Drilled, we look at where |
| 1:00.4 | that approach has landed us following an ethanol kingpin and carbon entrepreneur from Iowa to Brazil |
| 1:07.3 | and asking, is this really helping anything? |
| 1:12.0 | I hope you enjoy it. |
| 1:16.5 | And if you do, find drilled carbon cowboys wherever you listen to your podcasts. |
| 1:20.0 | Pushkin Plus subscribers can hear episodes early and ad free. |
| 1:25.2 | Sign up on the drilled show page on Apple or pushkin.fm slash plus. |
| 1:32.0 | Music fm slash plus. In early September |
| 1:33.6 | 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials |
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