Newsletter for the Alumni and Friends of
Hicksville High School Hicksville, New York

The Editors:
Buffalo Bob Casale '61	Linda (Piccerelli) Hayden '60
Pat (Koziuk) Driscoll '56	Bob (Gleason) Wesley '61

Contributing Editors: Bob Gillette & Walter Schmidt

Webmaster: Roger Whitaker

To contact the editors, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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The Newsletter

Birthdays & Anniversaries

Memory Lane

I Went Seaweed Foraging for the First Time and Hit the Mother Lode

July 24, 2022, CHAD CAMPBELL

I found the prized "Turkish towel" that I had been looking for.It's cool and foggy when I arrive at Schoolhouse Beach, a typical morning on this part of California's Pacific Coast.

It's these low temperatures that attract most visitors hoping to escape the summer heat farther inland.  But today's extreme low tide has attracted the group gathered down on the beach.  About 15 students are here to learn how to identify and harvest seaweed.

Schoolhouse Beach is an escape from the heat elsewhereForaging has grown into a movement over the last few years, including from your local ocean where it's now peak seaweed season.Our leader of this 3-hour class is Heidi Herrmann, who runs a company called Strong Arm Farm and guides public tours like this one through Forage SF.

"There's actually 640 different species [of seaweed] here on the California coast," she tells us before we dive in.  "They're all edible, too, and that's kind of the big, fun lesson of today is just let's kind of taste as we go along."Heidi makes a couple of cuts with her scissors and pops a crunchy, hollow circle of bull kelp into her mouth, as the class chuckles nervously.Want some of this bull kelp?
You must be prepared for a taste sensation on this foraging trip.

Chad Campbell

But not everything out here is for eating.  My wife, Elissa Rumsey, joined me, and her main goal is to find something known as "Turkish towel." I'm told that its rough leaves make a great exfoliant.

First, we find plenty of Turkish "washcloth", a version too small to bother with.  But after a few minutes of splashing through shallow tide pools and making my way over and around huge, slippery rocks, I see it: a single leaf of Turkish towel chondracanthus exasperatus.  It's about as- long-as my forearm.Eugene surveys our options

Elissa Rumsey

Our fellow forager and friend Eugene Kim drove up from San Francisco to join us for the forage. He was very excited for me.

"Oh!  That is the mother lode right there!  That is the good stuff! Nice," Eugene exclaimed.

He tells us that most of what he knows about seaweed, he learned from taking Heidi's class last year.

We are here at low tide so we can get to more of "the good stuff": the bladder wrack, the nori, and the kombu, seaweed that just hours before was under water and inaccessible.

You've no doubt seen seaweed washed up on the sand, which is decomposing and bleached by the sun.  That's not what we're looking for.  We need to get to it while it's still alive and anchored to the rocks, healthy, vibrant, and full of nutrients.here was an edible bounty on offer.

Chad Campbell

Eugene leads us into that intertidal zone. "So we're gonna grab this Ziploc bag and we're gonna grab a pair of scissors.  And we'll start heading out into the tide," he tells us.

Our first find is bladder wrack, which has lots of little bunches of dark green leaves. "You'll find this in health food stores," Eugene says.  "It's a really good source of iron and iodine as well.  You could put 'em in salads, right?  Give it a little flavor, a little punch."

Elissa is a fan. "I like it. It's salty, just a little hint of sea salt," she says after nibbling on a small bunch.

And it's important to do this sustainably, so we only harvest a small portion of each individual plant.  Eugene's rule of thumb is no more than 25%.  During this part of its lifecycle, the seaweed is still able to regenerate much of what we trim away.

Chad Campbell

We were careful not to take more than was sustainableA little farther down the beach we find a huge section of nori, the raw ingredient for sushi wrappers.

"They take this stuff, they dry it out, then they kind of crush it," Eugene explains.  "And then they turn them into flat sheets and then they roast it.  This is exactly what you would find in any of your sushi places or any Korean restaurant."

It's peak seaweed season and the pickings aren't slim.
This one was not so delicious, however.We don't recognize every piece of algae clinging to the rocks, but that doesn't stop Eugene. Remember, all 640 species we might find out here are edible.  I point to a long, stringy, dark red mass of seaweed hanging from the side of a rock.

"I have no idea what that is.  Let's taste some," Eugene exclaims.

After a quick snip and sample he concludes that just because you can eat it, doesn't mean you should eat it.

"This is bitter.  It does not look appetizing, and I would say it doesn't taste appetizing either," Eugene says.

Chad Campbell

Well, they can't all be winners.  But trying new things and sharing what you learn has led to some wonderful innovations around the world. Eugene gives a couple of examples, like how the tomato is integral to what we think of as Italian food, but they didn't have tomatoes before 1492. He goes on to talk about Korean food.

"Everyone thinks kimchi is spicy and it's got the chili peppers and stuff, which it does," he says.  "But chili peppers come from the Americas.  And so prior to the 1400s, Korean kimchi did not have chili peppers in it.  So I think it's incredible how global the world was even 500 years ago.  And how all these things that we think about, like Asian traditional culture, for example, they actually come from right here."

We pack up our bags of seaweed and head home, feeling just a little bit closer to nature and to the rest of the world.

Chad Campbell is a producer with NPR's Morning Edition.

Casale's Corner

Good morning. The climate bill will make cleaner energy cheaper for everyone.

By German Lopez

Solar panels in Grafton, Mass.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Ditching fossil fuels

By the end of today, Congress will likely have passed the biggest climate bill in U.S. history.

This newsletter has already covered the bills main goals and the back story of how it came together. Today, I want to get more detailed and explain how it will help people and businesses abandon the dirty energy that contributes to global warming.

What's in the bill

The bills climate provisions are mostly a collection of subsidies for energy that does not emit any carbon, like solar, wind and nuclear power. Without those subsidies, polluting fossil fuels are often still cheaper. The subsidies try to give cleaner energy an edge.

I don't mean this as an exaggeration: This really changes everything, said Jesse Jenkins, a climate policy expert at Princeton University. It is effectively going to shift the financial case away from dirty energy toward clean energy for everyone.

For consumers, the subsidies will reduce the prices of electric vehicles, solar panels, heat pumps and other energy-efficient home improvements.  You can claim the subsidies through tax filings; as a separate rebate if you don't file taxes; or, in some cases, immediately when you make a purchase.

Let's say you want to buy one of the cheaper, new electric vehicles on the market right now, priced around $40,000.  To get the subsidy, you will first want to make sure the car qualifies; the bill requires, among other things, that the vehicles are assembled in North America. (Ask the car dealer or manufacturer to find out.) Then, make sure that you qualify; individual tax filers cannot make more than $150,000 a year, for example.  And, given high demand, you might have to order a car well in advance.

If you meet the requirements, you can claim up to $7,500 in tax credits — effectively bringing the price of a $40,000 vehicle to $32,500.

That is the tax credit for new cars.  For used cars, there will be a smaller tax credit of up to $4,000.  The goal of both credits is to even the playing field: Cars that burn fossil fuels are still generally cheaper than electric vehicles.  With the credits, electric cars will be much closer in price to, if not cheaper than, similar nonelectric vehicles.

For home improvements, the process will be different, but the basic idea is similar. For a typical $20,000 rooftop solar installation, tax credits will cut the price by up to $6,000. There are also subsidies for heat pumps, electric stoves, and other energy-efficiency projects. The hope is to make all these changes much more affordable for everyday Americans, leading to less reliance on fossil fuels and expanding the market for cleaner energy.

President Biden touring wind turbines in Colorado last year.Doug Mills/The New York Times

The bill includes a slew of benefits for businesses, too. For example, they will be able to claim credits to replace traditional cars with electric ones, saving as much as 30 percent on each vehicle's cost.

Another set of incentives will encourage businesses to build and use cleaner energy. Similar credits have existed in the past, but they often expired after one or two years — producing unpredictable boom-and-bust cycles for investors and businesses.  This time, Congress is establishing the credits for at least a decade, helping create more certainty. And the credits will for the first time apply to publicly owned utilities and nonprofits, a large segment of U.S. electricity providers.

The bill does include a compromise: It requires more leasing of federal lands and waters for oil and gas projects.  Senator Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, demanded this provision.

But experts say that it will have only a modest impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, the bill will subtract at least 24 tons of carbon emissions for each ton of emissions that the oil and gas provision adds, according to Energy Innovation, a think tank.

It's a trade-off, my colleague Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environmental policy, told me.  But in terms of emissions impact, it's a good deal.

The bottom line

The bill will make cleaner energy and electric vehicles much cheaper for many Americans.  Over time, it will also likely make them more affordable for the rest of the world, as more competition and innovation in the U.S. lead to cheaper, better products that can be shipped worldwide.

And it will move America close to President Biden's goal of cutting greenhouse emissions to half their peak by 2030, according to three independent analyses.

Modeling for the new climate bill is based on draft legislation from July 27, 2022

The bill is also a sign that the U.S. is starting to take climate change seriously. That will give American diplomats more credibility as they ask other countries, such as China and India, to do the same. Still, many scientists believe the U.S. will eventually need to do more to prevent severe damage from climate change.  This bill is only the beginning, said Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara.