David Helvarg, Executive Director at Blue Frontier talked with Rob about the Sea Party Coalition Rally in Washington Nov 4, 2015 where a blue whale, full size was inflated in front of the Capital Building.  Reps. Curt Clawson of Florida and Mark Sanford of South Carolina, liberal Rep. Sam Farr of California, climate activist Bill McKibben, a former petroleum engineer, an evangelical minister and a surfer all spoke out against offshore oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic Ocean off of South Carolina.  Kudos to the people of South Carolina who are organizing to stop the drilling and “Don’t Spill on Me!”

Rob talks about the dark side of the Wondrous Atlantic Ocean Place campaign.  In the crusts of seamounts are the same high-tech and rare earth minerals that are mined in China.  High-tech metals highly concentrated in the crusts of seamounts include tellurium, cobalt, bismuth, zirconium, niobium, tungsten, molybdenum, platinum, titanium, and thorium.  Tellurium is combined with cadmium into an alloy that is considered the best material for production of multi-terawatt solar-cell electricity using thin-film photovoltaic technology.  The solar-cell industry has expressed interest in mining seamounts. The rare earth elements on the surfaces of the seamounts off New England’s shores include cerium, europium, lanthanum, and yttrium, a.k.a. Ce, Eu, La, and Y.

Tune in for information on how New England’s shores and sea life are threatened by a next-generation computer chip that is more efficient and immensely faster than existing chips.