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This is the biggest city in South America, but it's not night.
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It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
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The reason Sao Paulo is so dark is because the city is drowning in smoke from a massive fire over a thousand miles away, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
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And it's not the only one.
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Nearly 73,000 fires were recorded in the Amazon between January and August of 2019.
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That's an 83% increase from last year.
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And it's not accidental.
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Forest fires like this one are highly unnatural in the wet rainforest.
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Humans are behind this burn.
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Every year, huge swathes of the Amazon are deliberately and illegally burned to make room for cattle ranching.
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This season is called the "queimada".
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And it can lead to wildfires like these ones, which burn massively out of control.
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The wildfires have been especially widespread this year, which is also Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's first year in office.
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And that's no coincidence.
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Bolsonaro wants to open up the Amazon to mining and ranching, and has vowed to eliminate all protected areas.
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He says the environmental laws that protect the Amazon are suffocating his country.
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And he thinks global warming is nothing more than "greenhouse fables."
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This kind of rhetoric sends a strong message to those who hope to illegally burn the forest for their own gain:
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"Go for it. We're not coming after you. We just don't care."
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Illegal cattle ranchers seem to have gotten that message.
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And these are the results.
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All for hamburgers.
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It shouldn't take the financial center of Brazil going dark in the middle of the day to get the world to pay attention to this problem.
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Because even when soot isn't plunging 12 million people into darkness, the Amazon is still disappearing at the rate of three football fields a minute.
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Humans have already destroyed 15% of the Amazon.
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Scientists say if we lose another 10%, the entire ecosystem could collapse.
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And that would be catastrophic to life on Earth.
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The rainforest isn't just home to countless plants, animals, and indigenous people.
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It's one of the most important weapons we have in the fight against climate change.
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The massive rainforest absorbs up to 2 billion tons of carbon emissions each year.
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That's more carbon than Russia emits.
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It also safely stores carbon from decades past.
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150 to 200 billion tons of carbon.
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That's over 140 years' worth of human emissions.
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If the Amazon collapses, this carbon will be released.
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That would rock the world with unprecedented rapid warming.
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And we would lose our biggest ally in the fight against the climate crisis.
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Forever.
