Tonight, I want to talk about the Amazon.
The one that's losing half its assets, but not to divorce.
When I was growing up,
I heard a lot about how the Amazon rainforest needed saving.
This is the rainforest in 1900,
and this is the rainforest today.
Who caused all this damage to the rainforest?
Unfortunately, people did.
♪ The rain forest. The tropical rainforest. ♪
♪ Unfortunately, some don't understand ♪
♪ Like people coming in And clearing the land ♪
♪ Tragically this devastation Doesn't have to happen ♪
♪ That's why I'm on the mic here rappin' ♪
For the record,
I am absolutely fine destroying the rainforest
as long as that guy lives there.
Look, I always thought that was the weirdest PSA I had ever seen,
until I saw the one with Kevin Spacey.
I am the rainforest.
I watched them grow up here.
They've left, but they always come back.
Yes, they always come back.
That PSA aged so poorly,
Kevin Spacey doesn't even think it's hot anymore.
I know.
Hey, you didn't think you'd see him on Netflix again, did you?
They didn't even reshoot with Christopher Plummer.
You had no idea.
Now, the reason you probably stopped seeing PSAs
about the Amazon and saving the rainforest
is because we actually started saving the rainforest.
Between 2004 and 2012, deforestation plunged 84%.
Yes. It's shocking. Humans actually stepped up and did the right thing.
But let's not give ourselves too much credit.
We didn't save the rainforest as much as we didn't fully kill it,
but just like Nazis and high-waisted jeans,
deforestation is making a comeback.
In the last year alone, Amazon deforestation has jumped 13.7%,
a loss of nearly 1.2 billion trees.
Now, deforestation rates are on the rise,
and this couldn't be happening at a worse time for the planet
because when it comes to climate change, we are, and I cannot stress this enough...
fucked.
Dire new warnings about the effects of climate change.
Intense heat, waves, storms.
Deadly wildfires, droughts.
Ocean dead zones.
People are dying. They are dying.
You know Fox is gonna use that against her.
They'll be like, "Oh, really? You're talking about death,
even though you're still alive. Such a hypocrite.
Really, AOC?"
Now, look, we have to stop messing with the rainforest.
The Amazon is home to 10% of all species on Earth.
It absorbs 25% of the carbon emissions captured by the world's forests.
The Amazon also produces massive amounts of oxygen and water vapor,
which serves as the Earth's cooling system,
which is why the Amazon is often called...
The lungs of the Earth.
I don't know if you know this, but every part of Earth
is actually a body part.
The Amazon is the lungs. Canada is the forehead.
Iceland is the third nipple. Malta's the skin tag.
England is the birthmark. Italy is not the foot.
Australia is the foot.
Italy's the bladder. Germany's the benign tumor.
North Korea's the malignant tumor.
Argentina is the sinus, and Fiji is the prostate.
Going there is simply the greatest pleasure
you will ever experience.
The Amazon touches nine different countries,
but to really understand why deforestation is on the rise,
we have to look at the country responsible for most of it.
Brazil.
Now, there are a lot of great things about Brazil.
Carnival, Neymar, some percentage of Hailey Baldwin
and the Brazilian wax, which is another kind of deforestation.
But it's also very painful. Over the last five decades,
almost 20% of the Amazon has been destroyed.
Even though Brazil has laws to protect the environment,
those laws aren't always enforced because of insane amounts of political
and corporate greed, and I know as an American,
we should probably shut the fuck up when it comes to the moral high ground.
Americans lecturing Brazil about corruption
is like Steve Bannon launching a skin care line.
It's just like take care of...
your own shit before you...
dive into the whole face...
thing.
But corruption in Brazil is truly on a whole 'nother level.
Brazil's last three presidents were steeped in scandals.
Dilma Rousseff, impeached for financial misconduct.
Michel Temer, charged with corruption.
And Lula da Silva, currently in jail for stealing DVDs from a Redbox.
I'm just kidding, corruption.
And we haven't even gotten to Brazil's massive bribery
and money laundering scandal called Operation Car Wash.
Now I'll let Fareed Zakaria, aka the original brown John Oliver, explain.
The biggest corruption scandal ever anywhere in the world,
$788 million in bribes to various officials,
five former Brazilian presidents, nearly one out of three cabinet ministers
and almost one out of three senators have been indicted or investigated.
This is the country the world is relying on to protect the Amazon.
Thank God, America doesn't have that responsibility.
Can you imagine if we were in charge of the Amazon?
We would probably tear it down and build a headquarters for Amazon.
You just see a bunch of howler monkeys
driving UPS trucks with Kindles in their hands.
Now, unfortunately, things are going to get a lot worse
because of Brazil's current president, Jair Bolsonaro.
He's a former army captain who answers the question,
"What if Carl Sagan wasn't properly embalmed?"
And he's made it very clear
where he stands on the environment.
Mr. Bolsonaro campaigned to make Brazil great again,
to kick-start it's struggling economy.
And he sees the Amazon as Brazil's cash cow.
He may open up vast sections of the Amazon rainforest to mining.
He said he's gonna pardon people who have been fined for deforestation.
"We don't owe the world anything" sounds like the chorus to an Eminem song.
But Bolsonaro's stance on the environment doesn't even scratch the surface
of his insanity.
Jesus.
Bolsonaro sounds like every last comment before someone is blocked on Twitter.
This is why he's often referred to as the "Trump of the Tropics."
So think of Trump, but with even more tiki torches.
Bolsonaro also loves Twitter, and his tweets are insane.
The president, who tweeted a video apparently filmed at a carnival event,
showing one man urinating on another man in a sexual act.
On the plus side,
at least Brazil's seen their president's pee tape.
Now, eventually, "Golden Shower President" started trending online.
Bolsonaro then tweeted out, "What is a golden shower?"
I love how there isn't a Portuguese word for "golden shower."
Like, you ever been to another country and then you watch TV and they're like...
[speaks gibberish] "Macaulay Culkin."
You're like, "Something's happening with Macaulay Culkin."
Now, as dangerous as Bolsonaro's policies are for the Amazon,
that danger is fundamentally being driven by agribusiness,
which is the industry that produces the food that we eat.
Agribusiness accounts for almost a quarter of Brazil's economy
and is one of the biggest drivers of illegal deforestation.
Brazil is the world's largest exporter of sugar, coffee, soybeans, orange juice
and most importantly, beef.
The Amazon is home to millions of species,
and the biggest threat to the rainforest itself is this one.
Cattle ranching is responsible for up to 80% of deforestation.
And to turn the rainforest into grassland, they don't just cut it down.
They burn it down.
It's all about creating new pastures.
The Amazon rainforest is being burned down and destroyed.
Elizeu takes pictures of the tragedy
in order to tell the authorities what's going on here.
Anything that can still move tries to escape the inferno.
No no no, don't worry. That rat goes on to become a chef in Paris.
It's beautiful.
Brazil's beef industry is a huge driver of Amazon deforestation.
And it's dominated by a single company called JBS.
They're the largest meat processing company in the world.
Last year, JBS made $46 billion.
That's a double what McDonald's made.
Even more surprising, Brazil only accounts for 24% of their revenue.
Their U.S. division generates 76%.
That's $35.2 billion.
That's right, America. Once again, we are fucking shit up.
Look, if it's terrible, we're probably in the mix.
We're like the raisins of international relations.
Like, the rest of the world is like, "We fucking hate raisins."
And we're like, "Raisins are essential to democracy.
Raisins have to be in everything, raisins need to be in Afghanistan
for three plus decades."
JBS also happens to be one of the most corrupt companies in the world,
which isn't shocking because for a long time,
it was run by Joesley and Wesley Batista.
The Batista brothers. Now, come on.
Their names are Joesley and Wesley.
They look like dudes on a yacht Liam Neeson has to rescue girls from.
The Batista brothers are possibly two of the most corrupt people on Earth,
and they have history with the Bolsonaro administration.
Bolsonaro's current chief of staff has admitted to taking money from JBS,
and in the past, the woman who is now Bolsonaro's Minister of Agriculture
gave JBS tax breaks while also doing personal business with them.
The fact that senior members of the Bolsonaro administration
are closely linked to JBS is a huge liability
because the last president that got entangled with the Batista Brothers
was Michel Temer, and it ended horribly.
In exchange for no jail time, Joesley Batista strikes a deal,
providing information about bribing 1,829 Brazilian politicians.
The Batista brothers admitted to bribing almost 2,000 politicians,
spent roughly $150 million just in bribes
and agreed to pay a fine of $3.2 billion,
which is almost how much Facebook has to pay for destroying democracy.
Shouldn't it be, like, more?
It should definitely be more. JBS' business practices continue
to do environmental damage.
They have been accused of buying cattle from illegally deforested land
in the Amazon, even though they deny it and investigators recently arrested
Joesley Batista again
for allegedly bribing officials at Brazil's agriculture Ministry.
If that doesn't make you sick, their beef just might.
JBS bribed Brazilian food inspectors to give passing grades to spoiled meat.
And on the U.S. side,
their meat isn't any better.
A massive ground beef recall is now expanding.
The USDA says the Brazilian company, JBS is now recalling
more than 12 million pounds of ground beef shipped to stores across the U.S.
This past year,
JBS beef and chicken from the U.S. were found to have been contaminated
with hard plastic, rubber and e-coli.
All of which generally cost extra at Chipotle.
But even before that,
the US had banned all Brazilian beef imports, including JBS, indefinitely.
Do you know how bad your meat has to be for Americans to notice?
We thought Super Size Me was just a normal movie.
No lessons.
It actually just made us hungrier.
The Amazon has never been more vulnerable.
Between political corruption, Bolsonaro's pro-business agenda
and the incentives of agribusiness,
the Amazon is going to keep burning.
But there is some hope. The strongest blockade
against deforestation isn't more regulation or enforcement or fines,
it's people.
The Javari Valley Indigenous Reserve...
eight million hectares of Brazilian Amazon, the size of Austria.
It's home to the largest number of non-contacted tribes in the world,
photographed only rarely from the air.
There are nearly a million indigenous people in Brazil,
and almost half of them live in the rainforest.
Research shows that when indigenous people
have legal and physical protection,
so does the rainforest. Now, I know this looks like a map
of the only school of vaccinated kids in Orange County, but...
it's actually a time-lapse of deforestation.
The red is loggers and ranchers, and that part right there
is protected indigenous land, and the only reason they stop
is because these tribes are not fucking around.
The Guajajara Indians armed and in full camouflage,
crouch down for an ambush.
These vigilante patrols began six years ago
as a way to battle the region's powerful logging mafia.
They call themselves "The Guardians of the Forest."
The Guajajara are one of 305 tribes that have official demarcated land
that is legally protected by Brazil's Constitution,
but it is still a war for them.
And look, I know, deforestation has been on the rise
well before Bolsonaro, but no modern Brazilian president
has ever been this hostile toward the indigenous.
I don't know, racism sounds weird to me when you use the metric system.
I mean, if they're like, "Build the wall,
one kilometer at a time."
I'd be like, I don't...
I don't get it.
Bolsonaro is not just dog whistling to his base.
He is barking through a megaphone.
On the night of Bolsonaro's election in October,
a hospital and a school on an indigenous reserve
were fire-bombed and land invasion, when loggers and ranchers
take indigenous land, that has increased 150%.
Protected areas borders are a thorn in the side of many farmers.
They want their cattle to be able to penetrate the reserve.
First of all, I believe in God and then in the words of our President Bolsonaro.
He promised we would soon be able to enter the reserve.
The department in charge of overseeing indigenous lands
is an agency called Funai.
On Bolsonaro's first day in office, he took that function away from Funai
and gave it to the Ministry of Agriculture.
Remember? The same government agency that JBS paid off for years.
And even now, Brazil's Agriculture Minister
wants to open indigenous land to commercial farming,
but indigenous tribes are fighting back to defend their land,
and no one has brought more attention to the movement in recent years
than Sônia Guajajara. She's a prominent activist
for indigenous rights and was the first indigenous woman
in Brazil's history to run for vice president.
So I sat down with Sônia and her translator
to talk about her fight to protect the Amazon.
Here in America, we've already destroyed all of our forests,
and we raise millions of cows.
So do we sound like assholes
when we say, "Hey, Brazil.
Don't cut down your trees and don't raise cows"?
But you're saying we're assholes?
It's true.
Look, we're assholes, all right?
I admit it. America, we're assholes.
We still haven't given Captain America a promotion.
I mean...
What does a guy have to do to become Major America?
Now, for Sônia and her tribe,
protecting their homeland gets more urgent every day.
Last month, tribes from around Brazil gathered in the capital
for an annual march to protect indigenous rights
and take on Bolsonaro's policies.
Bolsonaro has escalated the fight against the indigenous,
but in many ways, he's just adding to a dark chapter of Brazil's history.
519 years after the Portuguese set foot in Brazil, it's the same fight.
On one side, are the people who live on the land
and want to protect it.
And on the other side are the people who see the Amazon
as a resource to exploit.
In Sônia's lifetime alone, over 1,400 people
have been murdered in Brazil because of land disputes,
but she isn't backing down.
Sônia doesn't just take on Bolsonaro in real life,
she trolls him online, too.
How did you get into the meme game?
Let me guess, it was your son.
I've seen a lot of your memes.
You have the classic Pinocchio Bolsonaro meme,
you have the golden showers dog peeing in Bolsonaro's mouth meme,
-Sí. -and then, of course, you've got this one.
I honestly don't know what's happening here.
So I wanted to help you with your memes.
Is that okay?
Claro.
Okay. So, let me know what you think of these.
This says, "When you're Bolsonaro and you haven't displaced
an indigenous person in eight minutes."
This is Bolsonaro right here, and he's getting one of those huge veins in his head.
Where he's like...
It's like if he doesn't say anything about indigenous people,
he looks constipated.
How about this one?
"You can't be jailed for corruption
if climate change wipes out all the people."
It's all good. This doesn't work. The meme game is a volume business.
Everything's not gonna hit. You've seen the girlfriend meme, right?
This is the Amazon rainforest.
This guy over here, that's the agribusiness lobby being like, "Oh, damn!"
Okay? And this is oxygen,
and oxygen's like, "Hello. We're together."
What do you think of the meme?
All right. How about this?
This is Bolsonaro, he's like, really staring at the Amazon.
Super creepy.
And the girlfriends like, "God, you're such a dick."
Sônia, you posted a photo of a dog peeing in Bolsonaro's mouth,
Alright, Sônia may not like my memes but...
I don't know. I wanted to take a page out of her playbook.
I wanted to find a way
to troll Bolsonaro and help at the same time.
So we thought, "Why not buy a website?"
Obviously, goldenshower.com was long gone.
Goldenshowerpresident.com was also taken,
probably by Michael Cohen.
But we were able to get...
goldenshowerpresidente.com.
Like, how did Bolsonaro's digital team not beat us to this?
It's just been there the whole time. If you go to goldenshowerpresidente.com,
you can donate to organizations that help protect the Amazon and its people.
Remember, it's goldenshowerpresidente,
The "e" is very important,
because we're trying to help the rainforest,
not get you fired.