S15, Ep6 | A Tipping Point

Amy: In 2015, western Indonesia and Singapore were covered in toxic black smoke.

Tim Sahay (02:16.4)  I had family living in Singapore and they couldn't breathe for months. And, uh, it was just billowing black peat smoke.

Amy: Tim Sahay 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 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 rain forests of Borneo were replaced with palm oil plantations. Plantation owners would use fire to quickly clear the rainforest, and then that fire would spread to dried out peatland, which can burn underground for weeks.

Tim Sahay 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. (02:39:7)

Amy: From June to October 2015 about two and a half million hectares of Indonesia burned.

When Tim sees what is happening now with corn ethanol in the US and Brazil, he thinks about what his family members went through in Singapore.

Tim Sahay:  (00:00) so if you grow soybean oil for example, or you grow corn oil, um, 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? (00:23.9)

Amy: 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 U.S., 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 Sahay:  (00:38.6) this sounds terribly dull and everybody's as an eyes, like immediately glaze over (00:44)  (00:45.9) but you and I know that this has enormous, absolutely transformational, in fact, horrific impacts upon the world, right? So when we did this kind of accounting in the American Congress, in, in the, in the 2007 sort of renewable fuel mandate, which is what created this enormous boom of corn ethanol in America well, what happened?

[music beat]

Amy: That’s the Renewable Fuel Standard that you heard Bruce Rastetter asking U.S. politicians in the last episode

Rastetter:  (1:09.2) 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 Sahay: The cheapest amount, the cheapest oil that was used, um, for, for your cakes and for your cookies  um, you know, basically stopped becoming corn oil. Because corn oil prices went up because corn's demand went up. And so, well, what's gonna 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, uh, Indonesian rainforests were razed to the ground. Between 2007 and the next 15 years in the forests of Sumatra, Borneo, particularly Borneo, and those rain forests were raised to the ground and replaced with palm oil plantations and palm oil plantations,

Amy: So the corn ethanol boom in the U.S., driven by policies that the 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 Sahay  it's just like one of the most sort of shocking, shocking sort of, um, features of what happens if you don't take into account that displaced land effect,

Now ag businessmen are pushing for similar policies in Brazil.

Felipe: That’s right, when the government started to regulate where sugar cane for ethanol could be grown, corn ethanol entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. Here’s Lucas Ferrante, the biologist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research that we (heard) from last time.

Lucas Ferrante (39:19) 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 the crops we have are expanding rapidly, where are the crops that made way for the sugarcane plantations going?

Amy: Again, when policies or the market encourage the expansion of a particular crop, that means whatever else was happening on the land it expands to–whether it was undeveloped land or planted with a different crop–is impacted.

Lucas Ferrante: When sugarcane plantations began to expand, some other 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. So these companies circumvented the ban by using other crops—which are actually less efficient for [ethanol] production—to expand their cultivation in these vulnerable biomes. We need to make this clear: we need a ban on crops for biofuel production in these biomes, not just on sugarcane crops.

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

Lucas Ferrante: corn isn’t advantageous for biofuel production. Sugarcane is much more efficient. Corn is only being used because of the ban on sugarcane.

Felipe: That’s right. And while we’ve been fôcuzd (focused) on one particular company and 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 Brasil, but also from Brazil’s Midwest 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 colonializãm (colonialism) isn’t green at all of course, it’s just regular old colonializãm (colonialism) with better markering (marketing). But why has it been so easy for fake green solutions to take root and spread?

I’m Felipe Sabrina with Intercept Brasil.

Amy: And I’m Amy Westervelt with Drilled.

Great question Felipe, especially since it’s been far easier for these supposed solutions to take hold–even when there are so many examples of them causing new and sometimes worse environmental problems–than real ones.

ALT:

Great question Felipe, especially since it’s been far easier for these supposed solutions to take hold than real solutions–even when there are so many examples of them causing new and sometimes worse environmental problems

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

[music up]

Amy: Welcome to the final episode of Carbon Cowboys

Felipe: Cowboys do Cerrado

Amy: After the break, the three Cs: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Climate Change.

[midroll]

Amy: Some political economists trace capitalism back to the Industrial Age, but in certain countries–the U.S. and Brazil, for example–you have to start earlier…with agriculture.

Jason Moore:  (00:45.4) in the centuries after Columbus makes landfall on Hispaniola, of course, in 1492.(00:52.5)

Jason Moore:  (00:52.6) in feudal Europe, uh, a, a, uh, critical mass point, uh, 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: That’s environmental historian Jason Moore, he co-authored the book A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things about the way that capitalism has devalued nature and humanity.

Amy: The Little Ice Age lasted from 1300 to 1850. Scientists call it that 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 need to study their history!

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

Amy: 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:  (04:39) 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 do, how to practice genocide, which they then extend to the rest of the world. (05:11) (13:27)  the Spaniards go and reorganize colonial Peru, and then the process redefine indigenous peoples as naturales, right, as part of nature. (13:36)

Amy: 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: That message gets emphasized by religion. Here’s just one example from the preacher at the Baptist church in Sorriso, one of the towns near Lucas in Mato Grosso.

Audio from the Sorriso Baptist Church – [2:52] Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image. They will be like us. They will rule—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.”

Amy: Right, 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: Right, the “Doctrine of Discovery” gives Christians the right to take any land occupied by non-Christians

Amy: And the philosophical musings of John Locke suggest that land should be owned by those who can “improve it” by cutting down trees, planting crops, raising animals, and building homes. This further justifies taking land from Indigenous people because they aren’t “using it.” From there it’s just endless expansion. But at a certain point, colonists run out of land. That happens in the U.S. in the 1930s.

David Correia: (00:00)  between World War I and World War ii, that was like the worst version, and that was the moment when there was no more land to settle. (00:07)

Amy: David Correia is a historical geographer at the University of New Mexico. He says in this moment, just before World War II, the U.S. 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 Correia:  (00:24.1) We can't exist as a settler society 'cause there's no more land to settle onto. We're, there's no other way to resolve these contradictions. So this is the age of like new immigration restrictions, the industrialization of agriculture. Um, it's, it's, by the way, and how I got into it, it's the moment that like hybrid corn is, is, uh, invented, uh, which dramatically increases yields, right?

Amy: Aha, there it is: corn! So the very first step the U.S. takes in the direction of industrialized agriculture is in the cornfield.

David Correia: (00:46.6)  It's also like if we, we also have to like, we, if we can improve plants, we can improve people, right? So that this is the rise of eugenics.(00:58.3) (2:03)  the solution was convert the settler strategy of constant expansion into, a different….or the same strategy, but like, but the expansion will happen like at a, at like a genetic level. So like, we'll expand the genetic capacity of plants and the genetic capacity of people. So it's the same thing, an expansion. (03:37)  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.(03:50)

Amy: 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 5000 years before the colonizers arrived–and “modernize” it.

Felipe: This sounds familiar to us. In Brazil, agriculture has always been tied to two words: colonializãm (colonialism) and exports. Another long and complicated story. But ever since the Portuguese colonized the country, our economic cycles have been built around huge landholdings 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, genéricali (genetically) modified seeds, and everything that came with them.

Amy: Yes! When Bruce talks about what attracted him to Brazil, he talks about how open the country is to “US technology.”

Bruce:  It's the country that most readily accepts US technology outside of the US,

Felipe: Green colonializãm (colonialism) is like the next phase of that expansion.

Breno Bringel [05’18’’]  foi a destruição ecológica causada pelo colonialismo, o que permitiu, séculos atrás, a partir de meados do século XVII, a criação de uma preocupação colonial pela preservação ambiental. [05’34’’]

[05’18’’] 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. [05’34’’]

Felipe: Breno Bríngueu (Bringel) 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 colonializãm (Colonialism), (vólium) Vol. 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 colonializãm (colonialism) isn’t doing any of that.

Breno Bringel [09’03’’]  essa nova face do colonialismo verde, o que está fazendo é reproduzir as relações do colonialismo histórico, buscando uma nova legitimação social em torno da ideia de descarbonização. Porque quem vai ser contra a descarbonização? Essa é a questão. [09’22’’]

[09’03’’] This new face of green colonialism is essentially reproducing the dynamics of historical colonialism, seeking new social legitimacy around the idea of decarbonization. Because who would be against decarbonization? That is the question. [09’22’’]

Amy: Right! It’s a genius way to justify continued expansion but market it as something else entirely.

Felipe: Exactly, Bríngueu (Bringel) points out that when it just continues to commodify nature, this new “green” colonializãm (colonialism) narrative is exactly the same as regular old colonializãm (colonialism).

Breno Bringel  [18’12’’] Quando a descarbonização se traduz prioritariamente em mercados de compensação, investimento em tecnologias que perpetuam desigualdades ou aumento de produção de matérias-primas verdes, Sem justiça social, sem justiça ambiental, vira canal de acumulação e reprodução do colonialismo verde. [18’30’’]

[18’12’’] When decarbonization 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. [18’30’’]

Amy: Silvia Secchi, an economist, geographer and professor at University of Iowa said something similar about how industrial agriculture approaches “sustainability” in the U.S.

Silvia: (04:17)  the goal is just, you know, uh, to farm the government. I mean, I think this, this is what these people excel at really farming the government and just kind of like coming up with the narrative that will, um, that will carry the day, right? And then it, we, without any compunction just switching to another narrative when the next narrative wins the day. (04:41)

Amy: And here, we’re going to come back to Bruce Rastetter.

Silvia:  (08:19.9) Rastetter has clearly been instrumental in promoting and, and supporting and navigating and shaping, uh, all this kind of like, um. Ethanol story, you know, and, and the reinvention of ethanol and, uh, the, the, you know, carbon capture and storage, but also, as you were saying, the carbon credits, uh, the money for cover crops, the money for, um, um, uh, conservation tillage. All these things are integral to this reimagining of ethanol as a. Uh, long term renewable, um, sustainable fuel. (09:01.9) (24:04)  it's a, um, putting lipstick on a pig.

Felipe: Luquinha! And in fact FS: Fueling Sustainability, Bruce Rastetter’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: 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. 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’m not a big finance bro…

Felipe: No, me neither. So we called up Vanessa Parreira Perin at the Federal University of São Carlos. She wrote a whole paper on green bonds in Brazil, and she walkdãs (walked us) through it.

Vanessa:

[03:46] uma corporação, um Estado, parte do Estado, né, pode ser um município, pode ser um órgão, por exemplo, o BNDES, ele precisa de dinheiro pra implementar uma certa atividade, então ele vai buscar captar diretamente com investidores.  Então ele emite esse documento, esse título de dívida, e aí ele é apresentado pra esse, pra uns investidores. (4'45'')  Então, mas por que que é o verde, né? O verde é porque ele vai passar por algumas etapas pra dar a credibilidade. (…) Um título verde, ele tem que ter alocação dos recursos dele, colocado exclusivamente em projetos, em atividades ou mesmo em ativos, né, por exemplo, uma usina, que vá criar benefícios ecológicos, né? É, tem que ser ambientalmente sustentável.

[03:46] 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. (4’45’’) 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, it has to be environmentally sustainable.

Amy: Vanessa says part of Brazil’s openness to U.S. technology is that technological approaches are viewed by financial markets as things that stabilize agriculture  and make it a good investment. There are so many variables in agriculture–funguses, bugs, extreme weather. Chemicals and machines are seen as a way to control these variables…today’s version of man versus nature.

Felipe: 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 then green bond market provided the fináncin (financing) for green colonializãm (colonialism).

Vaness: [11:17]  esse movimento é a partir do começo dos anos 2000, 12'32''  Os Estados são ineficientes, bem nessa lógica neoliberal, né, de que o ca– o Estado não é capaz de, de regular o que vai ser feito, né, com esse dinheiro, e é muito dinheiro que vai ser necessário. Então a gente vê como é– que começam a surgir acordos buscando trazer esse capital privado pra canais que possam chegar a projetos de desenvolvimento sustentável, né?

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

Vanessa: O governo brasileiro, por exemplo, tem um arcabouço. É, e aí nesse framework, ele precisa dizer onde ele– o uso dos recursos, onde ele vai alocar os recursos que ele vai receber. E tem que ser nos projetos elegíveis, tem que ser, é, projetos que estejam nessa lista, né, que, que os green bonds principles trazem.

The Brazilian government, for example, has a framework. Yeah, and then in that framework, they need to specify where they’ll—the use of the funds, where they’ll allocate the funds they’ll receive. And it has to be for eligible projects; it has to be, you know, projects that are on that list, right, the one provided by the Green Bond Principles.

Amy: Then you have to describe the sustainability of the activities you’ll use the green bond for.

Tem uma terceira etapa, quer dizer, como vai ser monitorado ao longo do tempo, né, durante o período que ele vai tá recebendo, né, esses títulos ver– esse dinheiro do título verde, esse investimento.

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 investment.

Felipe: But again, monitored by the company, which also reports on their progress.

E depois, ele tem que, uma quarta etapa, que é como que ele vai, é, divulgar esses dados, assim. Então, é s– é basicamente declaratório, né? Tipo, eu vou fazer isso, depois eu vou fazer aquilo, vou mo-monitorar desse jeito e vou declarar dessa forma. Não quer dizer que a ICMA vai acompanhar isso, ela não vai fazer isso, ela só criou essa referência.

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: When they first came about in 2007 and for the first decade or so 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 dollars and by 2022 it had ballooned to 2 trillion dollars. Various methods have been developed to verify the environmental gains funded by green bonds, and our friends at FS have embraced all of them, but Perrin says it’s more about paperwork and self-reporting than actually verifying environmental benefits. .

Vanessa: a ideia é que o Estado não precisa participar, né, dessa, dessa regulamentação, da verificação. Ele mesmo vai se autorregular através de, criando-se, é, partes entre os, dividir os stakeholders, né?

O termo que, que eles usam, né, as partes interessadas, e elas vão se, de alguma forma monitorar. Então você tem ali a, o emissor, ele é a primeira parte interessada. Depois você tem uma segunda parte, é, que são as SPOs, são as Second Party Opinions, que são empresas que fazem consultoria na área ambiental, na área de engenharia, na área de gestão, que, é, quem vai de fato avaliar um título verde.

E você tem terceiras partes que são instituições, por exemplo, como a CBI, a Climate Bonds Initiative, que são, é, geralmente organizaç– associações ou organizações, é, sem fins lucrativos, no caso da CBI, em que eles vão criando padrões, né? Eles criam referências do que que é considerado uma atividade sustentável, né?

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 the SPOs—Second Party Opinions—which are companies that provide consulting in the environmental, engineering, and management fields, and they’re the ones who will actually evaluate a green bond.

And you have third parties that are institutions, for example, like the CBI, the Climate Bonds Initiative, which are, well, generally non-profit associations or organizations—in the case of the CBI—where they create standards, right? They establish benchmarks for what is considered a sustainable activity, right?

Felipe: So, the verifications are really more about finánchal (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 agritchêmical iúzedj (agrichemical usage) are not factored into the equêijon (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: Então muita coisa vai ficar de fora, né. E o próprio monitoramento, ééé, que eu falei, né, é, é muito– como é autorregulado, né, muito– acaba sendo muito declaratório, assim, é, não vai ter esse cuidado, assim, ninguém vai lá fazer uma visita de campo, de um tempo, né, conversar de fato com as pessoas pra fazer essa análise de o que que aquele, aquele projeto tá gerando localmente, né.

Se a gente tá falando de soja, de milho, é, não é só, hã, o que a usina, por exemplo, tá produzindo. Ela tem vários fornecedores. Como que você dá conta do que cada um desses fornecedores de grãos tão fazendo em relação ao uso da terra, desmatamento.

So a lot of things are going to get left out, right? And the monitoring itself, well, —since it’s self-regulated, 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: In Brazil, soybean giant Amaggi and cattle conglomerate JBS, for example, have tapped the green bond market.

Felipe: Which brings us to the latest news for FS. In May 2026, as we were putting the fínishing (finishing) touches on this podcast, Amaggi, the soybean company owned by former minister of agriculture and láivstóc (livestock) Blairo Maggi and his family, pãrchézd (purchased) a 40% stake in FS. Bruce Rastetter retains the controlling stake, with 43% and the remaining 17% of the company is divided amongst Rastetter’s Brazilian business partners. You might remember Blairo Maggi was the politician who gave a speech at the opening of éfésses (FS’s) first corn ethanol plant in Mato Grosso. The deal was approved by the government. Amaggi took on more than $700 million in debt to finance the acquisition, prompting fínanchial (financial) analysts to issue warnings about the company being over-leveraged. But according to Vanessa, these figures aren’t actually that high given the amount of capital they’re able to raise through green bonds. FS itself had already raised $700 million through these bonds. And in 2021, Amaggi raised $750 million in green bonds to fáinence (finance) a small hydroelectric plant near indigenous lands, that was far from sustainable.

Vanessa: 56:24 to 58:01

E tinha, no caso da Amaggi, um título verde. E foi aí que eu fui atrás de saber o que que era, né? E era pra financ– eles emitiram esse título, é um título grande, acho que eles alavancaram setecentos e cinquenta milhões, né, de investidores estrangeiros e muito rápido assim, era mais do que eles esperavam e era pra uma série de projetos.

Então tinha muita coisa, né? Desde a originação de soja, é, sem desmatamento, né, melhorar os controles ali da cadeia e pra c– e um dos projetos era pra construção de uma usina que era a sexta usina, na mesma, na mesma região ali que eles iam construir. A, aí por isso que eu te– né, resolvi olhar pra essa questão de como esses títulos verdes apa– desaparecem de certa forma desconectados, né, do território.

Porque é claro que se você olha a usina, a tecnologia, você fala: "olha, energia limpa É energia verde, se tiver sustentável. Mas se você coloca ela em contexto, é, dentro dessa, isso, isso que eu descrevi, né, numa região que tem tantas usinas numa mesma bacia hidrográfica, aí você vê que já não é mais tão sustentável assim, né?

Isso claro que vai criar problemas pra, é, pra própria fauna do rio, pras comunidades que vivem ali no entorno, que já dizem: "ah, que determinado peixe a gente não tem mais, determinado mexilhão, umas conchas que uma, um povo indígena usa em alguns rituais, que eles também já tão tendo problemas em conseguir."

Então tudo isso não entra na análise de um título verde, né? Não cabe ali.

They raised 750 million from foreign investors very quickly—it was more than they expected, and it was for a 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 that 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: You know Felipe, something that I think is really important for listeners to understand here is that this infinite growth thing? It continues no matter who is running the government. Like in the U.S., it was Biden that increased the incentives for carbon capture in biofuels. And now in Brazil, it’s Lula who’s supporting the corn ethanol boom.

Felipe: Yes! It reminds me of something Kory Melby, the American agriculture consultant in Brazil said about agribusinessmen in both the U.S. and Brazil, that they really have no ideology beyond business.

Kory:  when you think of how conservatives of the past pro constitution land rights, Property rights were, were, were sacrosanct. Y but as soon as it Oh, it goes against their pipeline. they're not conservatives anymore, either They're businesses, period. And, and, 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 have thought that? You know, he's pro little guy, pro pro, small farmer, and you've got the Maggis and the Schaffers of the world all lining up behind Lula for another term, you know, and, and bringing Supreme Court justices out to the middle of Mato Grosso and giving them a town and a little village in their name.

Amy:  Yes exactly! I’ve also been thinking about something Tim Sahay 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 Sahay:  from a neutral scientific perspective, you would say exactly what you said, which is sugar cane ethanol has lower carbon intensity. It's, it's just cleaner. Just use that, don't use corn. But then we just talked about the political aspect of, of, of how all accounting is political and, and all are, how subsidy design is political. So what you are essentially gonna get is this kind of rear guard kind of stop, um, gap action by the corn growers to make sure that they qualify for every country subsidies.

Amy: I asked Silvia Secchi about whether carbon capture, or BECCS – bioenergy with carbon capture, like what FS is doing in Brazil–makes any of it any better.

Silvia:  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, BECCS is the, latest flavor of tech fix, right, which is sprinkled with some nice,you know, glittery, uh, sustainability and renewable kind of like, uh, uh, you know, uh, sugar-based stars or whatever. Uh. This is, we're talking about creative, uh, creating massive infrastructure to support a fossil fuel dependent. Uh, and, you know, going into fossil fuels ultimately, kind of like type of markets, right? With this, this. To the extent that we have this and we have blend walls and we have limits, this also means that we keep using oil, right? So to me, this is right. We're not gonna go to 100% corn because we would just be, um. We would just be growing corn for biofuels in the United States if we did that right. And, and eat air. Right? So it's not scalable. It really is complimentary, not substitute with fossil fuels and the, the internal combustion engine technology, it's extremely expensive and, um, disruptive.

Felipe: Breno Bríngueu (Bringel) talked about this too.

Breno Bringel É interessante a gente pensar o que todos esses arranjos têm em comum. O etanol de milho com todos esses outros dispositivos de mercantilização, de financiarização da natureza. O primeiro é a expansão da fronteira de commodities. Seja milho, sejam florestas plantadas ou novas infraestruturas energéticas, a lógica é sempre ampliar monoculturas ou ampliar o extrativismo em larga escala. Esse é o primeiro ponto comum.

It is interesting to consider what all these schemes have in common. Corn ethanol, along with all these other mechanisms of commodification and the financialisation of nature. The first is the expansion of the commodities frontier. Whether it be corn, planted forests or new energy infrastructure, the logic is always to expand monocultures or to expand large-scale extractivism. That is the first common point.

Amy: And like..I get why corn growers would be 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 will never be able to do the “neutral scientific” thing?

Felipe: Probably because it would be the final limit to capiralizãms (capitalism’s) endless accumulation.

Amy: A planetary limit really. And that’s an idea industry and the governments it supports have been fighting for a long time.

Felipe: Right, but the people who want to make real progress on climate need to stop fighting it.

Amy: That seems like a good place to start! …and to end this season. Thanks Felipe, it’s been an absolute honor to work with you on this. Obrigada!

Felipe:  Thanks Amy. 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!