A Tipping Point

Summary

Drilled – “A Tipping Point” (June 16, 2026)

Podcast: Drilled (Pushkin Industries)
Host: Amy Westervelt
Guests/Contributors: Felipe Sabrina, Tim Sahai, Lucas Ferranci, Jason Moore, David Correa, Sylvia Secchi, Vanessa Pajera Perrin, Corey Melby, and others.

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Episode Overview

This season finale of Drilled investigates the global expansion of "green colonialism"—how major agribusiness actors and financiers are using so-called “clean energy” projects, like corn ethanol and carbon capture, to promote land-hungry, polluting agricultural systems under the guise of solving climate change. Focusing on recent developments in Brazil and the U.S., the episode exposes the domino effect of policies that incentivize biofuels, discusses the philosophical and historical roots of the land-use juggernaut, and unpacks why genuine climate solutions are continually sidelined in favor of “market-friendly” greenwashing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Domino Effect of Corn Ethanol Policy

• 2015 Indonesian Palm Oil Fires ([02:14])
  • Corn ethanol incentives in the U.S. shifted corn from food to fuel, causing global food manufacturers to substitute palm oil for corn oil, leading to massive deforestation and unprecedented underground peat fires in Indonesia:

    “You ended up with vast underground peat fires in Indonesia that you just couldn't put out…A billion tons of CO₂ were produced.”
    —Tim Sahai ([03:18])

• The destruction was linked to policy: the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) prompted land-use changes with devastating planetary impacts.

2. Land Use Change & “Green” Policies

• Corn and sugarcane are directly competing for agricultural land, displacing other crops and natural vegetation and fueling further deforestation in Brazil’s Mato Grosso.
• Regulatory avoidance:
  • U.S. politicians lobbied to drop land-use change accounting from biofuel policies. ([05:10])
  • Brazil banned sugarcane expansion into its Amazon and Pantanal forests—intending to limit harm—but this merely shifted, not solved, environmental impacts:

  “We need a ban on crops for biofuel production in these biomes, not just on sugarcane crops.”
  —Lucas Ferranci ([08:19])

• Corn is a less efficient feedstock for ethanol than sugarcane, but rules and markets promote its expansion anyway. ([09:07])

3. The Roots: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Race ([12:35] – [19:43])

• Scholars and historians trace the ideology tying nature, property, and exploitation back to feudal Europe and colonial conquests.
• Jason Moore introduces how colonizers recast Indigenous peoples as “part of nature” to justify their displacement ([14:28]):

  “The Spaniards go and reorganize colonial Peru and…redefine indigenous peoples as ‘naturales,’ as part of nature.”

• US agricultural expansion hit a literal wall in the 1930s (no more land to settle), triggering the rise of industrialized agriculture and eugenics, with hybrid corn as a prime example ([17:17]).
• David Correa:

  “This is where the field of genetics is born. It actually starts in a cornfield where they're working on corn.” ([17:41])

• Brazil’s model of large monoculture, aligned with US-led modernization, is a legacy of colonial land systems and economic cycles organized around export crops. ([18:41])

4. “Green Colonialism” and the Logic of Expansion

• The expansion of US-style tech and agribusiness into Brazil is the newest phase—what guest experts dub “green colonialism.”
• “Green” solutions enable ongoing commodification of land and nature, but now under the legitimacy of fighting climate change.
• Branio Bringo on green colonialism:

  “The new face of green colonialism is essentially reproducing the dynamics of historical colonialism, seeking new social legitimacy around the idea of decarbonisation. Because who would be against decarbonisation?” ([20:34])

• Sylvia Secchi examines how U.S. industrial ag navigates shifting narratives:

  “The goal is just to farm the government…coming up with the narrative that will carry the day, and then…just switching to another narrative when the next narrative wins.” ([21:40])

5. Financialization & Green Bonds ([22:53] – [31:51])

• The Paris Agreement of 2015 shifted climate action toward “private sector involvement” and the growth of green bond markets.
• Vanessa Pajera Perrin explains the green bond process:
  • Claimed as “green” if money is used for projects that promise environmental benefits and pass standardized (often self-reported) evaluations.
  • Green bonds grew from a trickle in 2007 to a $2 trillion market by 2022—but with self-regulation and minimal verification of actual impact.

  “It’s basically declaratory…I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do that, I’m going to monitor it this way and I’m going to report it that way.” ([26:24])

  • On-the-ground harms like land-grabbing, deforestation, and pesticide use are rarely tracked. ([29:03])

6. Corporate Power, Political Expediency, and “Endless Growth”

• Recent mergers in Brazil’s agribusiness:

  • Soy kingpin Amagi bought a 40% stake in FS (Bruce Rastetter’s Brazilian firm), using hundreds of millions in new green bond debt. ([29:44])

• Crossing party lines: Both left and right politicians (Biden in the US, Lula in Brazil) support and subsidize these “climate” industries.

  “[Agribusinessmen] really have no ideology beyond business…They're businessmen, period.”
  —Corey Melby ([32:26])

• Systemic inertia: Even when scientific evidence points to inefficient or damaging solutions (e.g. corn over sugarcane for ethanol), political and market actors prefer whatever feeds corporate expansion and investment.

• Amy Westervelt:

  “Why do the people who keep saying that the climate crisis is urgent and they want to act on it…keep going along with it?” ([34:42])

• Felipe Sabrina:

  “Probably because it would be the final limit to capitalism's endless accumulation.” ([35:11])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Tim Sahai:

  “You ended up with vast underground peat fires in Indonesia that you just couldn't put out...A billion tons of CO₂ were produced.” ([03:18])

• Jason Moore:

  “Nature enters into the vernacular at this point to mean not human. And, oh, by the way, most human beings who work for a living are put into the realm of nature.” ([14:28])

• Preacher (on Biblical justification):

  “They will rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky...and over all the creatures of the earth.” ([15:42])

• Sylvia Secchi:

  “It's putting lipstick on a pig.” ([22:22])

• Amy Westervelt:

  “Green bonds...it's more about paperwork and self reporting than actually verifying environmental benefits.” ([27:20])

• Vanessa Pajera Perrin:

  “The monitoring itself…since it's self regulating, ends up being very declarative. So, yeah, there won't be that level of care. Like, no one will go there for a field visit…to analyze what that project is generating locally.” ([29:03])

• Corey Melby:

  “They're businessmen, period.” ([32:26])

• Sylvia Secchi:

  “Beck [Bioenergy with Carbon Capture] is the latest flavor of tech...It's extremely expensive.” ([33:45])

• Felipe Sabrina:

  “Probably because [acting on real climate solutions] would be the final limit to capitalism's endless accumulation.” ([35:11])

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Key Timestamps

• [02:14] — Indonesian Palm Oil Fires, Biofuel policies’ global ripple effects
• [04:11] — The domino effect of land-use change
• [06:22] — The food-to-fuel crisis and ecological disasters
• [08:01] — Brazilian policy response, deforestation, and biofuels
• [12:35] — Historical roots: Capitalism, colonialism, agriculture
• [14:28] — Justifying colonial land grabs: redefining humans as “nature”
• [17:17] — US runs out of frontier; industrial agriculture and corn ascend
• [19:29] — How US agricultural models inspired Brazil’s modernization—and monoculture
• [20:31] — Green colonialism as an extension of extractive systems
• [22:53] — Green bonds, Paris Agreement, and the financialization of climate policy
• [29:44] — Amagi's purchase of FS, green bonds, and risks of overleveraging
• [32:12] — Agribusiness and political expediency, crossing ideological lines
• [33:45] — Carbon capture, BECCS, and the limits of tech-based “solutions”
• [35:11] — Capitalism’s refusal to acknowledge limits

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Conclusion

This episode makes clear that policies and financial innovations branded as “green” or “sustainable” often replicate the very cycles of extraction, land grabs, and displacement that have driven climate catastrophe for centuries. With vivid historical context and incisive guest commentary, the hosts demonstrate how climate-friendly narratives are coopted into mechanisms for continued accumulation and expansion—without real solutions to the crises they claim to address.

“It's a planetary limit, really. And that's an idea industry and the governments it supports have been fighting for a really long time.”
—Amy Westervelt ([35:17])

The episode closes by underscoring the urgent need for systemic change and real planetary boundaries—versus endless innovation in greenwashing.

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(To those who haven’t listened: this episode masterfully connects the dots between agriculture, climate policy, colonial history, and financialization, exposing the risks lurking behind the “tipping point” of the green energy transition. It’s essential listening for understanding the structural barriers to meaningful climate action.)

Transcript

[Amy Westervelt]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Amy Westervelt]

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[Amy Westervelt]

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

[Tim Sahai]

They had family living in Singapore and they couldn't breathe. For months, it was just billowing black beach smoke.

[Amy Westervelt]

Tim Sahai 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 US 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. Then that fire would spread to dried out peatland, which can burn underground for weeks.

[Tim Sahai]

You ended up with vast underground peat fires in Indonesia that you just couldn't put out. You just couldn't put them out. So they're just billowing it all out. Right. And a billion tons of CO2 were produced.

[Amy Westervelt]

From June to October 2015, about two and a half million hectares of Indonesia burned. When Tim sees what's happening now with corn ethanol in the US and Brazil, he thinks about what his family members went through in Singapore.

[Tim Sahai]

So if you grow soybean oil, for example, or you grow corn oil and you say, okay, great, this thing is awesome and green, and now everybody starts to make sort of more corn oil. And that can sort of cause the displacement of land that was previously growing something else. And so then the question becomes, how do you count that displaced amount of land into your accounting methods?

[Amy Westervelt]

Meaning there's a domino effect to growing more corn for fuel. In Mato Grosso, where Bruce Rastetter and his Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz Paulo Franz and Miguel Vaz Ribeiro have driven a massive corn boom, we've seen displacement of a bunch of other kinds of agriculture and vegetation, not to mention a whole lot more pollution. In the US The Environmental Protection Agency used to require that businesses account for this kind of impact. It was called land use and land use change.

[Tim Sahai]

This sounds terribly dull and everybody's ears and eyes like immediately glaze over, but you and I know that this has enormous, absolutely transformational, in fact horrific impacts upon the world, right? So in the 2007 sort of renewable fuel mandate, which is what created this enormous boom of corn ethanol in America, well, what happened?

[Amy Westervelt]

That's the renewable fuel standard that you heard Bruce Rastetter asking us politicians about in the last episode. Let's talk about the RFS renewable fuels. Next subject. The RFS Ag industry backed politicians in the US Congress fought to get rid of the requirement to account for land use change.

[Tim Sahai]

The cheapest oil that was used for, for your cakes and for your cookies, you know, basically stopped becoming corn oil because corn oil prices went up, because corn's demand went. And so, well, what's going to be the cheapest oil? Became the question. And lo and behold, that answer instead of corn oil became displaced into palm oil. And palm oil is one of the most like, horrifically like, ecologically damaging things that happened was Indonesian rainforests were razed to the ground between 2007 and the next 15 years in the forest of Sumatra, Borneo, particularly Borneo, and those rainforests were raised to the ground and replaced with palm oil plantations.

[Amy Westervelt]

So the corn ethanol boom in the US Driven by policies that industrial ag business lobbied for, all under a giant green renewable fuels banner, increased the cost of food and created one of the world's biggest ecological disasters and carbon dioxide emitters in less than 10 years.

[Tim Sahai]

It's just like one of the most sort of shocking, shocking sort of features of what happens if you don't take into account that displaced land effect.

[Amy Westervelt]

Now ag businessmen are pushing for similar policies in Brazil.

[Felipe Sabrina]

That's right, Amy. When the government started to regulate where sugarcane for ethanol could be grown, corn ethanol entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. Here's Lucas Ferranci, the biologist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research that we heard from last time.

[Lucas Ferranci]

People have to remember that one crop displaces another to an area that will be deforested. We have a finite amount of land, and if we're introducing a new crop and all of the crops should we have are expanding rapidly, where are the crops that made way for the sugarcane plantations going again?

[Amy Westervelt]

When policies or the market encouraged the expansion of a particular crop, that means whatever else was happening on that land that it expands to, whether it was undeveloped land or planted with a different crop, is impacted.

[Lucas Ferranci]

When sugarcane plantations began to expand, some of the crops, especially livestock farming, expanded significantly, particularly at the border between the cerrado and the Atlantic forest. So there was massive deforestation. Then, back in 2008, if I'm not mistaken, since sugarcane plantations were causing so much deforestation, a decree was issued by President Lula prohibiting their expansion into the Amazon and the Pantanal. The intention was very good because it prevented high demand for a new crop from causing the degradation of that biome. However, the problem we need to remember is that the demand was for biofuels, not necessarily for sugarcane. We need a ban on crops for biofuel production in these biomes, not just on sugarcane crops.

[Amy Westervelt]

So a well intended environmental regulation led not only to more deforestation to plant corn, but also to the embrace of a new type of ethanol that everyone already knew was less efficient.

[Lucas Ferranci]

Corn isn't advantageous for biofuel production. Sugar cane is much more efficient. Corn is only being used because of the ban on sugarcane.

[Felipe Sabrina]

That's right again. And while we've been focused on one particular company in their approach this season, it is far from the only one. The problem is systemic. We've seen corn ethanol spread not just from the US to Brazil, but also from Brazil's Middle east to other parts of the country. More than half the new corn ethanol plants being built in Brazil today are outside of Mato Grosso. Green colonialism isn't green at all, of course. It's just regular old colonialism with better marketing. But why has it been so easy for fake green solutions to take root and spread? I'm Felipe Sabrina with Intercept Brazil.

[Amy Westervelt]

And I'm Amy Westervelt with Drilled. Great question, Felipe. Especially since it's been far easier for these supposed solutions to take hold than real environmental solutions. Even when there are so many examples of them causing new and sometimes worse environmental problems.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Especially when those solutions, like reducing consumption and energy use, run counter to capitalism's model of endless growth. Today, in our final episode, the bigger systemic problem that Bruce and the guys represent.

[Amy Westervelt]

Welcome to the final episode of Carbon Cowboys Cowboys. After the break, the three capitalism, colonialism, and climate change.

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[Amy Westervelt]

some political economists trace capitalism back to just the industrial age. But in certain countries, the US And Brazil, for example, you have to start earlier. And it starts with agriculture.

[Jason Moore]

In feudal Europe, a critical Mass Point was hit in the 14th century when the Little Ice Age arrived. And from there, a great wave of peasant revolts defeated Europe's feudal ruling classes.

[Amy Westervelt]

That's environmental historian Jason Moore. He co authored the book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. It's about the way that capitalism has devalued nature and humanity. The Little Ice age lasted from 1300 to 1850. Scientists call it little because it only impacted the Northern Hemisphere, where temperatures dropped by a little more than half a degree. Side note, that half a degree brought forth a complete societal revolution. So people who say a degree or two of warming is no big deal might want to study this history.

[Jason Moore]

And to make a very long and complex story short, those ruling classes had to find a way to find riches and power because they had been defeated in the countryside of Western Europe.

[Amy Westervelt]

To do that, they had to look elsewhere, to other parts of the world where they might be able to acquire land and with it, cheap labor. The Portuguese Empire, which eventually colonizes Brazil, is the first in the world to colonize land outside its realm. Beginning with the island of Madeira, the Spanish empire reaches the Americas first and immediately begins capturing and enslaving indigenous people. Moore says there's a specific way they're able to justify this.

[Jason Moore]

Nature enters into the vernacular at this point to mean not human. And, oh, by the way, most human beings who work for a living are put into the realm of nature. Women become the savages of Europe. As Silvia Federici reminds us, the language of savagery, wildness, barbarism, comes directly out of the English experience in Ireland, where the English learned how to practice genocide, which they then extend to the rest of the world. The Spaniards go and reorganize colonial Peru and in the process redefine indigenous peoples as naturales as part of nature.

[Amy Westervelt]

It's at this point that we get the whole man versus nature framework that we still hear from industrial agriculture today. This idea that it's man's job to dominate nature and extract from it.

[Felipe Sabrina]

That message gets emphasized by religion. Here's just one example from the preacher at the Baptist church in Soriso, one of the towns near Lucas in Mato.

[Preacher]

Then God said, let us make humankind in our image. They will be like us.

[Amy Westervelt]

They will rule.

[Preacher]

Repeat after me. They will rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, over the domestic animals, over the wild animals, over all the creatures of the earth, and over the creatures that crawl on the ground, Right?

[Amy Westervelt]

And Christianity intersects with not just colonialism and capitalism, but with the Evolution of private property and agriculture, too, helped along by the idea that Christians are more civilized and evolved than indigenous peoples.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Right. The doctrine of discovery gives Christians the right to take any land occupied by non Christians.

[Amy Westervelt]

And the philosophical musings of John Locke suggest that land should be owned by those who can improve it by doing things like cutting down trees, planting crops, raising animals, and building homes. This further justifies taking land from indigenous people because they, quote, unquote, aren't using it. And from there, it's just endless expansion. But at a certain point, colonists, they run out of land. That happens in the US in the 1930s, between World War I and World War II.

[David Correa]

That was the moment when there was no more land to settle.

[Amy Westervelt]

David Correa is a historical geographer at the University of New Mexico. He says in this moment, just before World War II, the US makes a turn toward industrialization, because that's the only way to keep expanding once the physical option of more land is no longer available.

[David Correa]

So this is the age of new immigration restrictions, the industrialization of agriculture. It's the moment that hybrid corn is invented, which dramatically increases yields.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Aha.

[Amy Westervelt]

There it is.

[Sylvia Secchi]

Corn.

[Amy Westervelt]

So the very first steps the US Takes in the direction of industrialized agriculture is in the cornfield.

[David Correa]

It's also like, we can improve plants, we can improve people, right? So that this is the rise of eugenics. Their solution was convert the settler strategy of constant expansion into a different. The same strategy, but the expansion will happen at a genetic level. We'll expand the genetic capacity of plants and the genetic capacity of people. It's the same thing of expansion. This is where the field of genetics is born. It actually starts in a cornfield where they're working on corn. So it's not an accident that it's a native crop that they focus all their energy on.

[Amy Westervelt]

First you take indigenous land to improve it. Then you take an indigenous crop, corn, which had been grown by native people in what is now the United States for 5,000 years before colonizers arrived, and modernize it.

[Felipe Sabrina]

And you know what, Emmy? This sounds very familiar to us in Brazil. Brazil agriculture has always been tied to two colonialism and exports. Another long and complicated story. But ever since the Portuguese colonized the country, our economic cycles have been built around huge land holdings and monoculture crops looking to the international markets. The idea of agricultural modernization, though the one that fascinates people like Bruce and his business partners, is much more recent. It took off in the late 1960s, inspired, believe it or not, by the US model. That's when the machines arrived along with pesticides, genetically modified seeds and everything that came with them.

[Amy Westervelt]

Yes, exactly. So when Bruce talks about what attracted him to Brazil, he always talks about how open the country is to US technology.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Green colonialism is like the next phase of that expansion.

[Preacher]

It's the country that most readily accepts

[Amy Westervelt]

US technology outside of the us.

[Lucas Ferranci]

It was the ecological destruction caused by colonialism that centuries ago, beginning in the mid 17th century, gave rise to a colonial concern for environmental preservation.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Braino Bringo is a political science and sociology professor at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and an editor of the book Green Colonialism Volume 1, Geopolitics and Socio Ecological Transitions. He doesn't argue with the idea that decarbonization and energy transition are critical to addressing the climate crisis, but he says green colonialism isn't doing any of that

[Tim Sahai]

as another facet of colonialism verging this

[Lucas Ferranci]

new face of green colonialism is essentially reproducing the dynamics of historical colonialism, seeking new social legitimacy around the idea of decarbonisation. Because who would be against decarbonisation? That's the question.

[Corey Melby]

Right?

[Amy Westervelt]

It's a genius way to justify continued expansion, but market it as something else entirely.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Exactly. Bringo points out that when it just continues to commodify nature, this new green colonialism narrative is exactly the same as regular old colonialism.

[Lucas Ferranci]

When decarbonisation primarily translates into carbon offset markets, investment in technologies that perpetuate inequalities or increased production of green raw materials, without social justice and without environmental justice, it becomes a channel for accumulation and the reproduction of green colonialism.

[Amy Westervelt]

Sylvia Secchi, an economist, geographer and professor at University of Iowa, said something similar about how industrial agriculture approaches sustainability. In the us, the goal is just

[Sylvia Secchi]

to farm the government. This is what these people excel at, really farming the government and just kind of like coming up with the narrative that will carry the day, right? And then without any compunction, just switching to another narrative when the next narrative wins the day.

[Amy Westervelt]

And here we're going to come back to Bruce Rastetter.

[Sylvia Secchi]

Rastetter has clearly been instrumental in promoting and supporting and navigating and shaping the reinvention of ethanol and carbon capture and storage. All these things are integral to this reimagining of ethanol as a long term, renewable, sustainable fuel. It's putting lipstick on a pig

[Felipe Sabrina]

leukemia and in fact FS fueling sustainability. Bruce Rasteter's Brazilian company has been doing the same thing. In addition to helping to start both the corn Ethanol and carbon capture industries in Brazil and pushing for the policies that will help them grow. FS has been a pioneer in what are called green bonds.

[Amy Westervelt]

Yes, green bonds really exploded when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. That agreement often gets pointed to as this great step forward for climate, and in some ways it was. But it also leaned really hard on the idea of involving the private sector more in solving climate change, and especially on the idea that financializing environmental gains was going to be this huge lever of progress. We just needed to reform the carbon offsets and credit markets to make sure those gains were real. On the sidelines of Paris, global investors even signed their own agreement called the Paris Green Bond Statement. I don't know about you, Felipe, but I am. I'm not a big finance bro.

[Felipe Sabrina]

No, me neither. So we covered up Vanessa Pajera Perrin at the Federal University of San Carlos. She wrote a whole paper on green bones in Brazil, and she walked us through it.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

A corporation, a government, or a branch of the government, like a municipality or an agency, for example. The BNDES needs money to carry out a certain activity. So it goes out to raise funds directly from investors. So it issues this document, this debt security, and then it's presented to these investors. So, but why is it green? Right. It's green because it goes through certain stages to establish credibility. A green bond has to have its funds allocated exclusively to projects, activities, or even assets like a power plant, for example, that will generate ecological benefits, right? Yeah, yeah. It has to be environmentally sustainable.

[Amy Westervelt]

Vanessa says part of Brazil's openness to US technology is that technological approaches are viewed by financial markets as things that stabilize agriculture and make it a good investment. There are a lot of variables in agriculture, right. There are funguses and bugs and extreme weather. Chemicals and machines are seen as a way to control those variables. Today's version of the man versus nature thing.

[Felipe Sabrina]

So the finance market in general created all these tools to support a certain type of modernized agriculture, that expansion that Correia talked about. And the green bond market provided the financing for green colonialism.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

We see this movement beginning in the early 2000s, where we see how agreements are starting to emerge that aim to channel private capital into initiatives that can support sustainable development projects. Right.

[Felipe Sabrina]

To issue a green bond, you have to go through four procedures. First, you write up a framework.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

The Brazilian government, for example, has a framework. Yeah. And then in that framework, they need to specify where they'll allocate the funds they'll receive. And it has to be for eligible projects.

[Amy Westervelt]

Then you have to describe the sustainability of the activities you'll use the green bond for.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

There's a third step that is how it will be monitored over time, right. During the period it's receiving these green bond proceeds, this green bond money, this

[Felipe Sabrina]

investment, but again monitored by the company, which also reports on their progress.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

And then there's a fourth step which is how they're going to, you know, disclose this data. So it's, it's basically declaratory, right? Like I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do that, I'm going to monitor it this way and I'm going to report it that way.

[Amy Westervelt]

When they first came about in 2007 and for around the first decade of their existence, green bonds were mostly issued by international development banks like the World Bank. But beginning in 2016, on the heels of the Paris Climate Accord, more corporations and governments started to get in on the action and the market exploded. By 2020, the green bond market was approaching $300 billion. And just two years later, by 2022, it had ballooned to $2 trillion. Various methods have been developed to verify the environmental gains funded by green bonds, and our friends at FS have embraced

[Odoo Advertiser]

a lot of them.

[Amy Westervelt]

But Vanessa says it's more about paperwork and self reporting than actually verifying environmental benefits.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

The idea is that the government doesn't need to be involved in this regulation or verification process. It will self regulate by creating, well, dividing the stakeholders into different groups. Right. The term they use is stakeholders, and they'll monitor each other in some way. So you have the issuer there, they're the first stakeholder. Then you have a second party which are SPOs, second party opinions, which are companies that provide consulting in the environmental engineering and management field. And they're the ones who will actually evaluate a green bond. And then you have third parties that are institutions, for example, like the cbi, the Climate Bonds Initiative, which are, well, generally nonprofit associations or organizations in the case of the cbi, where they create standards, right. So they establish benchmarks for what is considered a sustainable activity. Right.

[Felipe Sabrina]

So the verifications are really more about financial compliance than anything that's happening on the ground or in the atmosphere. In Brazil, that means that things like land grabbing and excessive agrichemical use are not factored into the equation. Now various actors in Brazil's government with close ties to agribusiness are trying to present the majority of agricultural production in Brazil as green.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

So a lot of things are going to get left out, right? And the monitoring itself, well, since it's self Regulating it ends up being very declarative. So, yeah, there won't be that level of care. Like, no one will go there for a field visit for a while, you know, to actually talk to people, to analyze what that project is generating locally. Right. If we're talking about soybeans and corn, it's not just what the processing plant, for example, is producing. It has several suppliers. How do you keep track of what each of these grain suppliers is doing in terms of land use and deforestation?

[Amy Westervelt]

In Brazil, soybean giant Amadji and cattle conglomerate jbs, for example, have tapped the green bond market.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Which brings us to the Latest news from FS. In May 2026, as we were putting the finishing touches on this podcast, Amagi, the soybean company owned by former Minister of Agriculture and Livestock Blyde Umaji and his family, purchased a 40% stake in FS. Bruce Hastetter retains the controlling stake with 43%, and the remaining 17% of the company is divided amongst Rasseter's Brazilian business partners. You might remember Blaid Umagi was the politician who gave a speech at the opening of FS's first corn ethanol plant in Mato Grosso. The deal was approved by the government. Amagi took on more than $700 million in debt to finance the acquisition, prompting financial analysts to issue warnings about the company being overleveraged. But according to Vanessa, these figures aren't actually that high, given the amount of capital they are able to raise through green bonds. FS itself had already raised $700 million through these bonds. And in 2021, Amagi raised $750 million in green bonds to finance a small hydroelectric plant near indigenous lands that was far from sustainable.

[Vanessa Pajera Perrin]

They raised 750 million from foreign investors very quickly. It was more than they expected, and it was for a second series of projects. One of the projects was the construction of a power plant. If you look at the plant and the technology, you might say, look, clean energy. It's green and sustainable. But if you put it in context in a region that has so many power plants in the same watershed, then you see it's not really that sustainable anymore. That's obviously going to create problems for the river's own wildlife, for the communities living in the surrounding area. That doesn't factor into the analysis of a green bond. Right. It doesn't belong there.

[Amy Westervelt]

You know, Felipe, something that I think is really important for listeners to understand here, too, is that this whole infinite growth thing, it continues no matter who is running the government, like in the US it was Biden that increased the incentives for carbon capture and biofuels. And now in Brazil, it's Lula who's supporting the corn ethanol boom.

[Felipe Sabrina]

And it reminds me of something Corey Melby, the American agriculture consultant in Brazil, said about agribusinessmen in both the US and Brazil, that they really have no ideology beyond business.

[Corey Melby]

When you think of how conservatives of the past, pro constitution, land rights, property rights were sacrosanct, but as soon as it, oh, it goes against their pipeline, they're not conservatives anymore either. They're businessmen, period. You know, and it's the same in Brazil. You got some of the biggest farmers in Mato Grosso that are pro Lula at the moment. Who would think that, you know, he's pro little guy, pro small farmer. And you've got the Maggie and the Shaffers of the world all lining up behind Lulu for another term and bringing Supreme Court justices out the middle of Matro Grosso and giving them a town and a little village in their name.

[Amy Westervelt]

Yes, exactly. I've also been thinking about something Tim Sahai said in our interview. I was asking him about why anyone would support corn ethanol in Brazil when it's so clearly not even the best crop for ethanol.

[Tim Sahai]

From a neutral scientific perspective, sugarcane ethanol has lower carbon intensity. It's, it's just cleaner. Just use that, don't use corn.

[Amy Westervelt]

I asked Sylvia Secchi about whether carbon capture or Beck, that's bioenergy with carbon capture, like what FS is doing in Brazil makes any of this any better.

[Sylvia Secchi]

So here's what I think. I think that the problem is that very often people don't take a systems perspective and they don't consider opportunity costs, right? So to me, Beck is the latest flavor of texts, right? Which is sprinkled with some nice glittery sustainability and renewable kind of sugar based stars or whatever. We're talking about creating massive infrastructure to support a fossil fuel dependent type of markets, right? So it's not scalable. It really is complementary, not substitute with fossil fuels. And the internal combustion engine technology, it's extremely expensive.

[Amy Westervelt]

And like, I get why corn growers would be super into all of it because it just keeps their business going. But why do the people who keep saying that the climate crisis is urgent and they want to act on it, people like Biden and Lula, for example, why do they keep going along with it? And why is there such an acceptance, even from scientists and advocates, that we'll never be able to do the quote unquote neutral scientific thing?

[Felipe Sabrina]

Probably because it would be the final limit to capitalism's endless accumulation.

[Corey Melby]

Right.

[Amy Westervelt]

Because it's a planetary limit, really. And that's an idea. Industry and the governments it supports have been fighting for a really long time.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Right. But the people who want to make real progress on climate need to stop fighting it.

[Amy Westervelt]

Yeah, that seems like a good place to start. Right. And to end this season. Thanks, Felipe. It's been an absolute honor to work with you on this and Alice and Marzia and everyone else on the team in Brazil. Obrigada.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Thanks, Emi. It was a great honor and a pleasure for me as well. I've learned a lot from you and from all of you who make Drilled what it is. Thank you very much.

[Sylvia Secchi]

Yay.

[Amy Westervelt]

We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Hamm, the Franz Brothers, Miguel Vaz Ribeiro, and all Summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment and have incorporated any responses we received throughout the season.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Carbon Cowboy Cowboys of the Cerrado is a collaboration between Drilled and the Intercept Brazil.

[Amy Westervelt]

The show was reported and written by Felipe, Sabrina and me, Amy Westervelt.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Our editors are Aldre Queen in the US And Alice de Sousa in Brazil.

[Amy Westervelt]

Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Ostwick. Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Jevardosa and Felipe Mux.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Theme song and original music by Eric Terrena.

[Amy Westervelt]

Additional music by Martin Saltz Ostwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming.

[Amy Westervelt]

US Fact checking from Naomi Barr.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Brazil fact checking by Studio Frontera.

[Amy Westervelt]

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.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Drilled is distributed by Pushkin Industries.

[Amy Westervelt]

Huge thanks to the team there including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Schrebernek and Jake Flanagan. To hear the Portuguese version of this series, head over to the Intercept Brazil site or search for the Intercept Brazil's podcast feed. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

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[Amy Westervelt]

Equal Housing Lender this is an iHeart podcast.

[Felipe Sabrina]

Guaranteed Human.