Greenhouse Mending

  Sea Rice Culturing of sea grasses is even more of a new frontier than working to protect coral reefs.   Sea grasses are not as exotic as coral reefs, but they are a comparable engine of fish habitat, carbon drawdown, and shoreline protection.   Eelgrass grows in large areas of temperate to polar waters. Certain sea grasses, such as eelgrass ( Zostera marina ) produce a cereal grain often called “sea rice.”   This grain has significantly more protein than rice as well as vitamin C and some of those oceanic omega fatty acids. [1]   Sea rice has been cultured by the Seri people around the Sea of Cortez in Mexico since before the Spanish conquest. Sea rice produces only half the weight of grain as conventional rice does, and there are no machine production implements as there are for rice.   However, this is because sea rice is an old-but-new crop.   Rice, maize, barley, and all the other commercially grown cereals were little more than grasses eig...

  I’m One up on Galileo In February 2022, I got one up on Galileo.   Two of my friends of several decades died within ten days.   I had picked up a case of covid when I found one of them deceased from covid and diabetes. I woke up coughing in the dark a little before 5 in the morning.   I could not get back to sleep, but I remembered a small news entry about a rare conjunction of Venus, Mars, … and Mercury.   Venus is the morning star, circling inside Earth’s orbit.   Mercury is even more so; inside Venus’ orbit, closest to the Sun.   Because it is closest to the Sun, Mercury is much dimmer than Venus and only appears briefly after sundown and briefly before sunrise, and it is only visible near the horizon. In his last years, the great astronomer, Galileo Galilei lamented that he had never seen Mercury.   He was the Pope’s official astronomer (despite the continuing controversy about that Earth moves...

  Longer & Wetter Grid Connections In Saving the World Before Breakfast: A Better Green New Deal , I noted that regional-sized and even continental-sized grids have advantages of being able to “wheel power” from areas with extra power to areas willing to buy.   The European Union’s electricity grid is the largest most interconnected continental power network in the world, [1] and its operation suggests that regional grids will continue to grow in size and capabilities.   The Europeans also have the longest submarine power line to date, the 580-kilometer (360-mile) NorNed high-voltage direct-current line carrying power from Norway to Holland and the deepest cable that runs between Italy and Sardinia. [2]   However, the second edition of Better Green New will have an addition.   These cables would be dwarfed by the proposed Australia-Asia PowerLink project, working its way through the approval processes of several countries in 2021.   The genesis o...