Bonus Ep 3: The Big, The Bad and The Biofuel

As it turns out, biofuel fraud schemes were happening all across the US almost as soon as the credits were introduced back in two thousand and five.

But I was interested to find out how biofuel became such a big industry in the first place, and why things ended up going this wrong.

I also had this other pretty fundamental question, one that I think gets asked very rarely when discussing biofuel fraud.

Like, was it really the planet-saving invention that it was made out to be? To get some of these answers, I spoke with Don Carr.

My name is Don Carr.

I live in Minnesota.

For about the past twenty years, I've done investigative journalism and advocacy.

Don Carr grew up in Sioux Falls, a Midwestern city wrapped around the banks of the Big Sioux River in South Dakota.

For the most part, his work has focused on American agriculture and its impact on the environment.

Coming from a generation that didn't grow up with screens and growing up in South Dakota, we spent a lot of time outside.

You're either hunting, you're fishing, kayaking, rock climbing, hiking, anything we do outside.

And so I kind of love nature and love the outdoors because it's really part of our day-to-day almost entertainment.

As an adult, this love for the great outdoors evolved into a passion for environmental advocacy.

Don worked with environmental groups on political issues and campaigns, including the Farm Bill, a huge piece of federal legislation that essentially governs all of American agriculture and food policy.

This was familiar territory for Don.

His family actually owned a farm where they grew grain and raised cattle, but that didn't blinker Don to the havoc agriculture could wreak on the natural environment.

The farm bill notoriously incentivizes a lot of destruction of natural environments, plowing under wild fields, you know, focus on just a few grains instead of a diverse farming ecological system.

And from there, I kinda got radicalized into the environmental movement, witnessing kind of the devastation happen in all these wild places that I grew up loving and playing in being plowed under.

The natural landscapes Don had known as a child were increasingly being repurposed for intensive farming.

Don covered this landscape shift as a journalist, writing for Politico and the Huffington Post, and even appearing on national news.

He had another passion, though.

Um, I do the stuff during the daytime, so at night I, I like to write fiction.

That's just the way I like to do it.

I was working on actually a novel.

At the time, Don had a book agent.