Thanksgiving: Dreamland is on hiatus this week. Have a happy Thanksgiving! We return next week with a great new show. In the meantime, big news: Whitley and Anne’s new book the Afterlife Revolution is available for preorder for Kindle and will be available shortly for all ebook readers, in paperback and as an audiobook read by Whitley! To preorder for Kindle now, click here.
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In late October, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson announced that his company is backing the concept of a carbon tax, saying that climate change brings real risks, and serious action is required to mitigate them.
“We have long used a proxy cost of carbon… there’s a range depending on the country, depending on the tax that we think would be appropriate,” Tillerson explained at the Oil & Money conference in London. “We’re trying to influence and inform people and business on the choices they make.”
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Researchers report that for the first time, they are finding areas of extremely low oxygenated water, called "dead zones" off the coast of Africa. The dead zone just measured contains less oxygen than any previously recorded. Dead zones are so named because, low in both oxygen and salinity, within them fish cannot survive and suffer massive die-offs, especially when dead zones approach coastal areas. Virtually no sea life can survive in the one just found off the coast of southern Africa, and, unusual for these formations, it is moving, destroying all life in its path.
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Plastic waste is one of the scourges of the modern world, being generated via every industry from electronics to packaging and vehicles. Once discarded, plastic chokes our landfills and oceans for centuries, and when one considers that humans produce almost 300 million tons of plastic each year, the extent of the problem becomes all too clear.
A new discovery made by researchers at North Dakota State University, Fargo, could help to solve this serious environmental issue, however, as they believe they have paved the way for the creation of a new type of plastic that can be broken down into molecules when exposed to a specific type of light. What is even better news is that once the plastic has broken down, it can be recycled to form new plastic products.
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