428. The Simple Economics of Saving the ...

Podcasting started as a niche-nerd pursuit. Now it’s a $9 billion industry. Is that a lot? The strange economics of this thing we do. SOURCES:Jim Bankoff, chairman and C.E.O. of Vox Media.Ben Davis, head of digital at WME.Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of ... Show More

An economist calls America’s beef industry a “miracle.” An antitrust scholar calls it “broken.” Maybe they’re both right? SOURCES:Austin Frerick, agriculture antitrust expert, fellow at Yale University, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry ... Show More

That’s the question at the heart of a battle between Kalshi and state gambling regulators. As prediction markets boom, there are other questions, too — about insider trading, market manipulation, and whether the public has turned against them. (Part two of a two-part series.) SOU ... Show More

<p>Everyone agrees that massive deforestation is an environmental disaster. But most of the standard solutions — scolding the Brazilians, invoking universal morality — ignore the one solution that might actually work. Originally released on <i>Freakonomics Radio</i>, Steve gives ... Show More

The Amazon rainforest is perhaps the world's greatest single environmental asset. For years the accepted wisdom has been that the remorseless tide of destruction there is unstoppable. Justin Rowlatt travels to Brazil to question this conventional account and finds that over the l ... Show More

<p>The economics are clear-cut: the benefits of preserving the lungs of the world <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/03/02/saving-the-rainforests-would-be-a-bargain?utm_campaign=a.io&utm_medium=audio.podcast.np&utm_source=theintelligence&utm_content=discovery.content ... Show More

<p>The Brazilian legislature is currently considering a bill that would legalise the private occupation of some public land in the Amazon region - a move that would most likely lead to further deforestation. But could renewed international pressure from foreign governments and ... Show More

The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest but this crucial carbon sink is facing increased deforestation. Land clearing for mining or agriculture has increased under Brazil's president Jair Bolsanaro. But the world needs the Amazon jungle to keep absorbing carbon if more ambit ... Show More

To solve the climate crisis, we need to make tropical forests worth more alive than dead, says environmental economist Nat Keohane. Highlighting the urgent need to stop deforestation and the carbon pollution it brings, he details the work of the LEAF Coalition -- a first-of-its-k ... Show More

Palm oil is in nearly every commodity you use — food, shampoo, makeup and more — but harvesting this essential material has contributed to the destruction of millions of hectares of forests globally. Sustainability leader Andika Putraditama shares how a groundbreaking collaborati ... Show More

Over the last 40 years, Brazil has lost an area larger than California to deforestation — and 90 percent of the clear-cutting has been illegal, all part of a multi-billion-dollar global environmental crime economy. Civic entrepreneur Ilona Szabó de Carvalho sees this crisis as an ... Show More

A big new push toward nature conservation (and saving the planet) is based on a simple premise: remove humans from the equation and let nature take its own course.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.