As previously mentioned, insufficient handling of sexual harassment cases by mangers was a common theme among all interviewees, highlighting the need for their additional training. Through interviews, workers were able to explain, in more detail, what they would like to see covered in a sexual harassment training . Likewise, interviews provided the opportunity for workers to explain exactly what policies or guidelines they would like established and publicized in their workplace. Examples of policies included being able to ask a security guard to walk you home, an anonymous hotline number and permission to ask security guards for assistance in closing a store for the night. Given the unique study population of this project, there are several limitations to consider when interpreting the results. As previously mentioned, the sample of survey respondents was a convenience sample of cannabis employees represented by UFCW Local 770; respondents were not randomly sampled from all cannabis retail employees in Los Angeles County. Likewise, interview participants were also recruited through snowball sampling and were not randomly selected. All workers in the study sample are represented by a labor union and therefore the generalizability of the findings to all workers in the cannabis industry is limited as rank-and-file cannabis members of UFCW represent only a small subset of the cannabis industry. Future studies should recruit a larger sample size as it will allow for greater generalizability and further analyses. And as labor unions continue to grow their membership among cannabis workers,grow racks with lights additional studies should compare the experiences with sexual harassment among unionized and non-unionized workers. A second limitation of the analysis was the sample size of the data.
The small sample size reduced the power of the study and created challenges for isolating effect sizes between the outcomes of interest and the independent variables, particularly in the multivariate models. With the understanding that sexual harassment is an under reported phenomenon, the analyses were likely impacted by respondents who reported never experiencing sexual harassment as it is possible workers simply did not feel comfortable disclosing such information. A larger sample size of workers across the state or ideally the nation as more states legalize the consumption and commerce of cannabis may also reveal regional differences in the effects of laws and policies that protect workers’ safety. There were also several issues regarding the survey tool. Although the survey was able to gauge frequency of harassment experienced by respondents using a Likert scale, it was not conducive to creating a discrete variable of harassment and consequently incidence rate could not be calculated. For example, the response option “once a month or less” could imply harassment was experienced anywhere from two to 12 times in the last 12 months as it was the second option after reporting experiencing harassment “once” in the past 12 months. Providing more definitive response options may aid in developing more epidemiologically accurate variables. Questions from the SEQ-DoD were also originally developed to measure sexual harassment as it is experienced by women and studies show it is not as effective for capturing the experiences of men . In order to capture more precisely the phenomena of sexual harassment by all participants, future studies should utilize a more comprehensive survey for sexual harassment. Recall bias was also present in data collection as respondents were asked to remember specific examples of sexual harassment and the frequency at which those experiences occurred in the last 12 months.
Finally, without a direct comparison to another workplace or industry applying the same methodology, it is difficult to make definitive statements about prevalence of sexual harassment in cannabis relative to other industries.Rapid increases of energy consumption and human dependency on fossil fuels have led to the accumulation of greenhouse gases and consequently, climate change. As such, major efforts have been taken to develop, test, and adopt clean renewable fuel alternatives. Production of bioethanol and biodiesel from crops is well developed, while other feedstock resources and processes have also shown high potential to provide efficient and cost-effective alternatives, such as landfill and plastic waste conversion, algal photosynthesis, as well as electrochemical carbon fixation. In addition, the downstream microbial fermentation can be further engineered to not only increase the product yield but also expand the chemical space of bio-fuels through the rational design and fine-tuning of biosynthetic pathways toward the realization of “designer fuels” and diverse future applications. There is a clear need to transition energy dependence from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources to address the unprecedented pace of climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Overwhelming evidence has shown that human activity is the major driver of climate change and that its consequences are impacting food production, migration patterns, economic, and political stability on a global scale. In the US alone, 6.677 gigatons of GHG were emitted in 2018 with the largest fractions being attributed to transportation , electricity generation , industry , commercial and residential applications , and agriculture. As all these activities are largely dependent on fossil fuels, technological advances and diversification of alternative energy sources hold promise to significantly reduce carbon emissions and alleviate climate change. Predating the use of petroleum itself, bio-fuels such as vegetable oils, animal fats, and ethanol were used for heat and illumination .
This is exemplified by the first mass-produced car, the Ford model T, which ran on corn-derived ethanol. As automobile production became increasingly industrialized in the early 20th century, it became evident that the ethanol production scheme could no longer meet the ever-growing fuel demand for internal combustion engines. Today, with environmental policies pushing for a reduction of GHG emission, aided by recent advances in crop engineering and fermentation processes, bioethanol and biodiesel production have once again become viable and sustainable surrogates for petroleum-based fuels. Bioethanol is derived from corn and sugar cane in the United States and Brazil, respectively, which together account for 84% of the total global production. In the United States, bioethanol production has reached a volume of 15.7 billion gallons in 201917, thus meeting the mandatory 10% supplementation requirement for gasoline. In Europe, the lack of cultivable land and the ban on genetically modified crops has largely limited bioethanol production. As such, 75% of the bio-fuel market in the European Union is composed of biodiesels derived from rapeseed, palm oil, soybean, and used cooking oil. As of 2015, bio-fuels have reduced carbon emissions by 589.3 million tons and will continue to play an important role in renewable energies. Recent advances in battery technology have substantially increased the power density of electrical energy storage devices, thus accelerating the development of electric vehicles. However, to date, electricity in the US is still predominantly derived from fossil fuels such as gas and coal. Furthermore, limitations in the driving range, high capital cost, the lack of infrastructure, and power-to-weight ratios preclude the implementation of electric long-haul vehicles and aviation. To reach a carbon-neutral to -negative transportation scheme, a more diversified approach therefore requires the use of both electric vehicles and bio-fuels alike. Specifically, electric vehicles hold promise in short-range and light-weight configurations, whereas the use of bio-fuels offers significant advantages for conventional long distance ground transportation and aircraft. To mitigate GHG emissions while meeting the global fuel demand, bio-fuel technology advancements need to focus on optimization of current bio-fuel-production technology for higher productivity and efficiency of lignocellulosic biomass conversion, diversification of feedstocks to ensure the viability of bio-fuel production within existing ecological and economic constraints , and expansion of the chemical space toward designer molecules that improve fuel economy and performance while reducing carbon emissions. Major efforts need to be devoted not only to overcome technological barriers but also to integrate social, economic, and environmental factors to provide long-term, cost-effective,rolling benches for growing and reliable production systems for the bio-fuel industry. The predominant problem with first-generation bio-fuels is that they are derived from food crops , which require fertilization, water, and soil, and thus directly compete with food production. Tight regulations on the use of pesticides and genetically modified crops further limit their utilization in sustainable transportation. In order to mitigate these short-comings, second-generation bio-fuels are derived from non-edible lignocellulose remnants of plants, which consist of up to 70% polymerized sugars and constitute the most abundant form of biomass on Earth. These bio-fuels are attractive because their net carbon footprint can be neutral or even negative, and their generation from agricultural and forest residues or white wood chips provides economic advantages compared to crop. However, using lignocellulose for bio-fuel production requires energetically and financially costly extraction of fermentable sugars such as thermal, chemical, and/or biochemical pre treatment.
As a result, despite the fact that the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 set an annual blending target of 16 billion gallons of cellulosic bio-fuels by 2022 for the US24, by 2017 production had amounted to less than 2% of this benchmark. Significant technological progress has since been made in the production of lignocellulosic bio-fuel toward a clean and economically viable process, including advances in energy crop engineering strategies, efficient degradation of lignocellulose, and simultaneous manufacturing of higher-value products. The climate benefits of large-scale lignocellulosic bio-fuel production were initially questioned due to its potential competition with land use for reforestation; it is believed that energy crop cultivation may result in less carbon capture efficiency than reforestation, leading to a carbon debt that must be compensated by the carbon negativity of the resulting bio-fuels. However, recent analysis of switch grass production on transitioning crop/pasture land showed that in fact, its GHG mitigation potential is comparable with reforestation of this land and has several times more mitigation potential than grassland restoration. Additionally, the ability of energy crops such as sorghum to grow on marginal lands provides an avenue for bio-fuel production that minimizes the competition for necessary farmable land to support the growing population . In order to maximize the land use for lignocellulosic bio-fuel production, crops have been engineered to be more productive in accumulating biomass by increasing their photosynthetic capacity and carbon fixation efficiency . Biological processes like non-photochemical quenching and photo respiration are bio-conversion of photon energy into fixed carbon. This is because the NPQ process dissipates excess photon energy as heat , and the transition from an NPQ state to a carbon fixation state is generally slow, leading to mass energy loss in field conditions. It has been shown that over expressing the genes responsible for NPQ relaxation in the model crop Nicotiana tabacum can accelerate the switching process, resulting in ~15% increases in plant height, leaf area, and total biomass accumulation. Additionally, plants have evolved to maximize light capture with much of the energy wasted. While counter intuitive, diminishing a plant’s light harvesting capacity in dense field conditions has a drastic and beneficial effect on biomass accumulation. In fact, truncation of light harvesting complex antenna components decreased the capacity for light capture in engineered lines resulting in a 20% increase in total biomass accumulation under these conditions . Photo respiration is another process that limits productivity due to Ribulose-1,5-Bisphosphate Carboxylase/Oxygenase’s capacity to react with molecular oxygen in place of CO2 thus leading to a net loss of carbon sequestration efficiency. Therefore, introducing an engineered photo respiratory bypass pathway into bio-fuel crops has the potential to increase the energy conversion efficiency of the plant29,30. Eventually, many of these traits can be stacked into individual bio-fuel crops to increase plant productivity and maximize biomass production as technologies for advanced plant engineering and gene regulation are developed31 . Metabolic pathways to synthesize products with higher values can also be incorporated in the meantime to increase the economic feasibility of lignocellulosic bio-fuels as fossil fuels are currently produced at a far lower price than bio-fuels, and simultaneous manufacturing of higher value products with bio-fuels would increase their economic viability. ‘‘Molecular farming,’’ which couples agriculture with the production of high-value small molecules and proteins including therapeutics and antibodies, is a promising strategy for increasing the value of lignocellulosic biomass. Accumulating these molecules after integrating their bio-synthetic pathways in a bio-fuel crop background and introducing efficient extraction schemes into the processing pipeline can drastically decrease production costs, thus increasing profits. This has additional implications for medicine, as cancer bio-logics and viral antibodies can be produced in planta at high levels in the field without the need for sterile manufacturing systems. This is one of the most promising strategies to achieve economic viability for bio-fuel production, although transgene bio-containment strategies will need to be implemented to prevent unwanted transgene flow from engineered crops 38 .