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About This Podcast
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 and 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.
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Recent Episodes
S15E5 The Saudi Arabia of Biofuels
With the sustainable aviation fuel industry set to explode, carbon capture has thrown the corn ethanol industry a lifeline...but what does another corn ethanol boom mean for everyone else? This…
S15E4 Into the Amazon
Industrial agriculture has wrapped itself in a green cloak in Mato Grosso, promising jobs, money and endless opportunities, all in the name of "sustainability." But the good times are only happening…
S15E3 The Brazilian Midwest
Bruce's Brazilian business partners run the state of Mato Grosso and the town the company is headquartered in. So while he fights endless pushback to his pipeline project in Iowa, business in Brazil…
S15E2 The Ethanol Kingpin of Iowa
Bruce's venture in Brazil isn't the first time he tried to go global. What an earlier attempt tells us about him, his business, and what's ahead for both Iowa and "the Brazilian Midwest."This season…
S15E1 The Carbon Gold Rush
As his American company Summit Carbon Solutions struggles with backlash to a carbon capture pipeline linking corn ethanol plants across the Midwest, Bruce Rastetter is not slowing down. Instead, he’s…
S15 Welcome to Carbon Cowboys
For decades we’ve heard that “the markets” will solve the climate crisis. On Drilled: Carbon Cowboys, we put that theory to the test, following Bruce Rastetter, a corn ethanol kingpin-turned-carbon…
S14 Fossil-fueled Fascism
The U.S. invasions of Venezuela and Iran are more of the same imperialism in service of oil majors. As the climate crisis makes its presence more urgently felt, fossil fascism dictates a…
S14 On Petromasculinity and Protest
Repression of protest has ramped up in the U.S., but everything that's happening now began with the backlash to the Standing Rock protest back in 2016. In today's episode we look at the connections…
S14 Never Let a War Go to Waste
Lots of people are talking about the similarities between Iraq and Iran, but in this episode we place the two in the context of another war—World War I—and the historical arc of fossil fascism.See…
S14 Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips
What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to…
S14 10 Years After Berta Cáceres’s Murder, Why Is Honduras Still So Dangerous for Environmentalists?
This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the hired hit that took Berta Cáceres’s life and robbed both the Honduran and global environmental movements of a uniquely effective leader. Cáceres was…
S14 From Question Everything: Why did ICE Lock Up this Pro-Trump Reporter? (Part One)
Last June, journalist Mario Guevara was arrested while covering an anti-ICE protest in Georgia, transferred to ICE detention, and locked up by the federal government for more than 100 days. But Mario…
S14 Just Because the U.S. Says It's Legal Doesn't Make It So: Companies Trading in Illegally Seized Venezuelan Oil Face Legal Risk
Fernanda Hopenhaym, member of the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights walks Drilled senior global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani through the many legal pitfalls companies getting…
S14 How Climate Protest Backlash Led to Present-Day Repression
It's easy to feel like climate "doesn't matter" as the United States descends into fascism, as if climate and democracy are somehow separate issues. Researcher Oscar Berglund and Amy Westervelt…
S14 A "Green Transition"? If Only It Were That Simple
In More and More and More, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz shows that the human history of energy is one of accumulation, not substitution. Here, he talks to reporter Adam Lowenstein about how the "energy…
S14 Introducing Lawless Planet: "Surveillance and Sabotage on the Dakota Access Pipeline"
When activists Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya take drastic measures to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, they have no idea that a shadowy private security contractor called…
S14 Drilling Deep: John Vaillant on Climate Change and Wildfire
Wildfires are becoming more intense, frequent, and destructive as the climate heats up. Drilled reporter Royce Kurmelovs and Canadian author John Vallaint, author of Fire Weather, discuss the…
S14 The Norwegian Paradox: Norway's Fossil Fuel Dilemma
In this bonus episode of The Black Thread, we examine a single legal case that distilles the Norwegian paradox perfectly: the planned electrification of the Melkøya gas processing plant. It's a key…
S14E14 How Climate Activists Successfully Fight Obstruction
Despite growing repression worldwide, climate activists continue to stick it to obstructionists and drive change. In this season's finale, Jennie Stephens (University of Ireland Maynooth) and Sharon…
S14E13 How Litigation Works to Fight Climate Obstruction
It's bleak out there and while climate obstruction can feel overwhelming, there are efforts being made to fight back against it. One of them is litigation and holding corporations legally…
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Drilled has published 256 episodes since May 2018, covering topics in Earth Sciences, Science.
Drilled is currently highly active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 30m.
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