How girls in developing countries are learning during COVID-19

by Stacy Kim

COVID-19, a large disruption to education worldwide, has been affecting girls more severely as UNESCO estimates that 11 million girls may not go back to school after the pandemic. 

By Stacy Kim

Educational inequalities have been more prevalent for girls in developing countries during COVID-19. Blocked from access to education, many girls are losing hope to pursue their dreams any longer. For instance, UNESCO found that about 11 million girls might not go back to school after the pandemic. One of the primary reasons is that many people in developing countries perceive girls as less important than boys and believe that girls are only suitable for housework or childcare. In some cases where their parents passed away because of COVID-19, the majority of girls are forced to go to the cities to get a job to support other family members. Or a lot of them might end up being homeless. To protect girls from the harsh realities, Wagaye Mengistu, a manager at Center of Concern in Ethiopia, said community perception of girls should change. 

California Dairy Farmers are Saving Money—and Cutting Methane Emissions—By Feeding Cows Leftovers

by Stacy Kim

California Dairy Farmers are Saving Money—and Cutting Methane Emissions—By Feeding Cows Leftovers

As California farmers work to curb methane emissions from the state’s sprawling dairy farms, they’ve found a convenient solution that helps control costs—and happens to offer benefits for the climate.

By feeding leftover nut shells from nearby almond orchards, dairy farmers not only support their neighboring farmers, they divert waste that would otherwise go into landfills where it generates methane. These leftovers also provide nutrition for the animals, replacing traditional forage like alfalfa that requires big swathes of farmland and copious amounts of water to grow.

“From a sustainability standpoint, it’s a game changer,” said Michael Boccadoro, a longtime livestock industry consultant and president of West Coast Advisors, a consulting firm and advisor to the dairy industry. “It means less land, less water, less energy, less fertilizer, less pesticides and less greenhouse gases.”

A 2020 study by University of California at Davis researchers demonstrates the benefits of feeding cows the material left over after an agricultural raw material is processed. Dairy farmers in California feed their cows other by-products, too, including spent grains from breweries, and vegetable scraps. Much of this would end up in landfills if not fed to cows, because it’s either too expensive to transport to other markets or has little value beyond cow feed, the researchers say.

Shrinking the Carbon Footprint

The report found that if dairy farmers were unable to feed their cows these by-products, they’d need traditional forage, like alfalfa, instead. Producing that would require “1 million acres and 4 million acre-feet of water,” and would raise feed costs by 20 percent, the researchers found.

Cows’ unique digestive systems enable them to turn these by-products into usable food that would otherwise go to waste. But their digestive systems also emit large amounts of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas.  More than half of California’s methane emissions come from cattle operations, mostly from dairy cows.

As California, the nation’s biggest dairy-producing state, tries to reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions—40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050— the dairy industry has come under pressure to shrink its carbon footprint. The state’s powerful dairy industry blocked methane regulations for a decade, but in 2016 the state passed a law requiring the livestock industry to cut methane emissions 40 percent by 2030.

To meet the goals, California dairy farms have been taking on a variety of initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including building dairy digesters that capture methane, burning it to make electricity or turning it into renewable gas. The state’s Department of Food and Agriculture is also promoting manure management programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cattle droppings, another significant source of methane from the production of dairy products.  The industry claims it generates 45 percent less greenhouse gas emissions today than it did 50 years ago to produce a glass of milk from a California dairy cow.

But feeding the animals is also a significant source of greenhouse gases, and the researchers point out that incorporating by-products into cows’ diets is a key component in the dairy industry’s efforts to cut climate-warming emissions. If dairy farmers can find the optimal diet for their cows—one that makes them more productive, but also uses fewer resources—that, in theory, shrinks the industry’s carbon footprint overall. Most dairies in California have nutritionists that design specific diets to make cows more productive. The industry says these efforts are working.

“The number of cows in California is starting to decline,” Boccadoro said. “Production is staying the same, but we’re able to achieve the same level of production, every year now, with fewer cows. This means that our carbon footprint is being reduced naturally through better efficiency and improved use of by-products.”

About

by Stacy Kim | 1 Comment

Stacy Kim is a fourth-year student at Baruch College where she is studying journalism and creative writing. She is the recipient of the Baruch Climate Scholars research scholarship, which has allowed her to engage in research on climate issues in developing countries, public policy and natural sciences. She also volunteers at Jesus Love House Mission, with the goal of empowering those who were cut off from society to see themselves as members of the community. Her desire to help people at a disadvantage stems from her goal of solving climate impacts on low-income people. Upon completion of her studies, she intends to apply to law school to further her knowledge of environmental law and become a lawyer who—on the side of the weak—provides nature standing at courts.

Citrus Growers May Soon Have a New Way to Fight Back Against A Deadly Enemy

by Stacy Kim

Citrus Growers May Soon Have a New Way to Fight Back Against A Deadly Enemy

By Stacy Kim

The Asian citrus psyllid fills its stomach by feeding on the leaves and stems of citrus trees.

The tiny brown insects infect the trees with bacteria that cause citrus greening, a disease that makes the fruits inedible. Natives to Asia, the citrus psyllids were first found in the United States in Florida in 1998.

Over the last 15 years, citrus greening, also known as Huanglongbing or HLB, has ripped through Florida’s storied citrus crop, and now has moved into California. But an experimental treatment holds promise for combating a disease that has proved resistant to attempts to halt its spread.

Citrus production in Florida, which has traditionally ranked first in the nation, dropped five percent from the 2018-2019 season, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last year, California surpassed Florida in citrus production, accounting for 54 percent of the nation’s total citrus crop, the report found.

But California citrus, too, has been infected with huanglongbing, which discolors the skin of affected fruit, turning it green. The Asian citrus psyllid was first detected in San Diego County in 2008, and has since spread to Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Once infected, citrus trees can show symptoms that include yellow shoots, asymmetrical blotchy mottling on leaves and misshapen, bitter fruit.

Trees infected with the disease—caused by the bacteria Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus—are cut down to prevent other trees from being infected. According to the USDA, Florida has gone from producing nearly 80 percent of the nation’s non-tangerine citrus fruit to less than 42 percent since the arrival of the disease.

Although farmers and scientists have tried insecticide applications and treatment with antibiotics as short-term fixes for citrus greening, none of these has been effective in controlling the disease.

Hailing Jin, a geneticist at the University of California, Riverside, said her research team has recently discovered a potential treatment that is easy to manufacture and costs very little to make.

“The acceleration of the infection is scary,” Jin said. “It happened later in California but is still affecting them almost to the same level. That’s why we have to figure out some strategies to control the disease.”

After a seven-year search, Jin said she found citrus varieties that were immune to the citrus disease and identified a peptide in them that suppressed the disease and gave trees immunity. In her experiment, Jin used the peptide from one of the citrus fruits that is resistant to the disease—the Australian finger lime—and found that even a very low level of the peptide can be more effective in killing bacteria than higher concentrations of antibiotics.

In 2019 Trump’s EPA made a controversial decision to allow citrus growers to use the antibiotics streptomycin and oxytetracycline on commercial citrus. Health authorities feared that use of the drugs could increase antibiotic resistance, reducing the effectiveness of the medications.

However, the antibiotics, Jin said, are far less effective than the peptide treatment in her experiments.

“We found that the peptide can kill the bacteria within 30 minutes while antibiotics needed five hours to kill the bacteria but failed to kill them completely,” Jin said.

Unlike antibiotics, Jin’s peptide has a low risk of toxicity in citrus and does not have a toxic effect even at a high concentration. The peptide has another unusual feature: It stays active even after 20 hours of exposure to a temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, making it more reliable than antibiotics, which can be rendered less effective by sunlight.

Most important, when injected into infected trees, the peptide can promote the growth of citrus trees and reduce the concentration of the bacteria that causes huanglongbing.

To test whether the peptide could produce immunity to citrus greening, Jin’s research team also sprayed the peptide on uninfected, healthy citrus trees. Five days after the treatment, the trees were exposed to the psyllid insects. After 12 months of spraying with the peptide solution every two months, the trees showed more growth.

‘A Potential Breakthrough’

Nian Wang, a professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences who was not involved in the study, said Jin’s peptide is a “potential breakthrough for HLB control” that can reduce its symptoms and prevent new infections. He noted that “It is paramount to further investigate other mechanisms that are responsible for the tolerance/resistance of HLB-tolerant/resistant citrus genotypes.” The peptide will provide one useful tool, Wang added, but a more thorough and coordinated management approach is necessary to defeat HLB worldwide in the long run.

Despite the efficacy of the treatment, field trials of the new treatment, which could take two to three years to be fully implemented, have been stalled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jin said. In the meantime, the citrus industry and farmers continue to use antibiotics.

But agriculture experts said that more eco-friendly management strategies could be found. California, which has a lower infection rate than Florida, “has an excellent plan in place to monitor and remove diseased trees,” Wang said.

In California, once the greening disease is detected in citrus trees, growers are encouraged to call the free statewide pest hotline. An expert will come to the infected sites, cut down the trees and establish quarantines for the affected orchards “to prohibit the movement of all citrus nursery stock or plant material out of the affected area,” according to the state’s Citrus Pest & Disease Prevention Program.

Some scientists speculate that climate change might protect citrus in California’s Central Valley from Huanglongbing, if winters become too cold and summers too hot for the citrus psylids, according to the University of California, Davis website.

In the absence of an effective treatment for the disease, farmers can also choose to plant disease-tolerant varieties of citrus such as Valencia sweet oranges, Vernia oranges or Sugar Belle oranges. In a 2020 article published in the journal Phytopathology,  Wang proposed that comprehensive implementation of strategies like the removal of infected trees, insect control, and replacement with trees not infected with the disease could successfully control the infection, arguing that failure of those short-term strategies can be attributed to the “small-scale or incomprehensive implementation of the program.”

To investigate whether a comprehensive implementation of strategies could successfully control the disease, Wang tried implementing such an approach in the Gannan region of China. The result was surprising: “Overall HLB in Gannan decreased from 19.71 percent in 2014 to 3.86 percent in 2019,” Wang and his co-authors wrote.

A comprehensive approach, Wang said, can be important in keeping the population of disease-carrying insects as low as possible until something better is available. In the meantime, scientists are working towards coming up with a long-term solution, the only way that citrus orchards can fully recover and regain their vitality. “One method won’t be enough because it’s a serious problem. All the different methods must be created to control the disease,” said Jin, adding that her research team is working to develop citrus fruits that are tolerant to huanglongbing.

“It’s going to require the work of a lot of different groups — the government, the scientific community, and interested stakeholders,” Nathan Donely, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “It’s going to take some time to find a long-term solution, and in the meanwhile, we need to provide some of these growers relief.”

For his part, Wang said he is optimistic.

“Overall, I think the citrus industry will win the war against HLB,” he said.

Shale drillers in Texas need to stop “flaring” gas into the atmosphere

by Stacy Kim

In order to remove excess gas from oil drilling, shale drillers have been resorting to burning natural gas in wells, also known as “flaring.”
Natural gas — a byproduct of oil extraction — is less valuable than oil, hence the reason oil companies burn natural gas.

Venetta Seals, the mayor of Pecos, Texas, said, “Without the infrastructure being here, the only other solution is what, they stop drilling? That would certainly turn things upside down out here if that were to stop happening.”
To stop burning natural gas would require adding more pipelines or decreasing oil production, which would adversely impact the short-term profits of these oil companies.

Oil production is a lucrative business and a vital source of revenue to energy companies and local economies. Failing to see the big picture of wasting natural gas by flaring may bring forth unexpected consequences.
In some respects, Seals is operating rationally in the interest of her community; oil sells for $69 a barrel whereas natural gas is worth $3 per million British thermal units. Nonetheless, Seals’ projections may be shortsighted.

To understand why, it is important to ask two questions. The first is, how would people feel knowing that energy companies are adding greenhouse gases that impact global temperatures?

Furthermore, how would people living near a flaring zone cope with headaches, dizziness and loss of coordination caused by the release of methane?

Rather than striving for maximum profit margins, the government should start looking into the several long-term consequences flaring gas will have on the public’s health, well-being and the economy.

With more flaring, the environment has been deteriorating. Flaring emits greenhouse gases equivalent to 2 million cars, which exacerbates the effects of global warming.

Aaron Bernstein, a doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, said that even a small global temperature increase could lead to troubling consequences, like rising sea levels, population displacement, disruption to the food supply, flooding and an increase of infectious diseases.

Rising sea levels, as salt water seeps in, contaminates the drinking water supply and adversely impacts human health.

The significance is that the government should look out for the health and well-being of its citizens in order to produce efficient workers and build a better community — this cannot be done without creating a healthy climate.

First of all, the problem is that the state government gives these companies permission to flare. Most oil production businesses resort to burning gas due to the fact that flaring is much more convenient than planning and manufacturing brand new natural gas pipelines.

The simplest way to limit flaring is to heavily tax companies that choose to do so because more companies will most likely decrease the amount of gas they burn. Another solution is to utilize this excess natural gas as an energy source.

Natural gas is used to generate electricity, fuel automobiles, heat water and bake food. It is also used frequently in the manufacturing process to produce glass, steel, cement and many other commodities.

Natural gas vehicles not only emit less pollutants — or greenhouse gases — but they also cost less than vehicles that run on gasoline. Despite the potentially devastating consequences of burning natural gases, there is still room for change.

Governments and individuals should recognize what will benefit them the most in the long run and cooperate to tear down the old tradition of flaring, which leads to nothing but ruin and devastation.

Stacy Kim
September 13, 2018

CUNY Professors Hit with Major Reduction in Teaching Hours

by Stacy Kim

By Stacy Kim

20 September 2018

Faculty members and students at Baruch College are raising concerns about the dwindling number of black and Latino faculty members.

An oversight hearing chaired by New York City Council Member Inez Barron was held on Sept. 27, with the purpose of ending the long-fought battle and coming up with a solid initiative.

Barron lamented that the percentage of black hires of the CUNY colleges remains nearly flat despite the fact that CUNY schools are located in culturally diverse areas.

“Since 1997, the lack of black hires was a constant struggle,” Dr. Arthur Lewin, a professor at Baruch College, said. A document — the Master Plan — that promised to enrich the culture of CUNY schools has been changing every four years.

Interim Chancellor Vita C. Rabinowitz testified at the hearing, saying that the main focus of CUNY Central is to bring in more diversity and hire more underrepresented minorities.

However, the Quarterly Report on Faculty Diversity conducted by CUNY’s Office of Human Resources Management proves how empty those promises are.

According to the report, the percentage of black hires was only 2.5 percent and the percentage of Latino faculty was 5.9 percent.

“As a student who takes liberal arts and social science courses exclusively and who is a senior completing the last year of a bachelor’s degree, I can count on one hand, the number of ethnic minority professors that have instructed me,” said Liam Giordano, a senior who spoke about his experience.

“I find this incredibly disappointing and unrepresentative of our diverse city and its pool of qualified, educated individuals looking to teach for our school.”

“In the black and Latino Studies Department, it is currently down to just three [full-time] professors without hiring replacements for those that leave, which brings the slow, deliberate destruction of the Black and Latino Studies Department,” Lewin claimed.

According to Giordano’s research, “Of ten courses under the subject ‘Black Studies,’ six were the basic, introductory course into ‘Black Studies’ that fulfills a CUNY core requirement for undergraduate students, and there are no graduate-level courses pertained to black or Latino studies this semester.” A decrease in the number of courses in African-American Studies is unlikely to attract students interested in the field to Baruch College.

In addition, the administration had promised a Strategic Diversity Plan in 2013 in which it will have periodic meetings with black and Latino faculty to resolve the issue and promote diversity. Five years have passed since administration pledged to this. Still, faculty members are complaining of seeing no progress in this long-standing issue.

Throughout the hearing, Barron shed light on the failures of recruiting and supporting faculty diversity. Although no clear-cut initiative was proposed, the efforts to increase faculty diversity will continue, she said.

Robert Holden, a professor at New York City College of Technology, said in the hearing, “If the university is serious about hiring black faculty, there will be an improvement.”

Giordano, taking an active role for making changes, explained his future actions. He “intends on addressing this issue to the University Student Senate and will propose a taskforce to investigate the shortcomings of the promises made by CUNY regarding staff and curriculum diversity, and following that, leadership within the Senate can put forward a recommendation,” adding that we still need to do more research.
Giordano, representing more than 500,000 students at CUNY, is hoping for having a well-rounded education.

The core value of the administration taking actions lies in providing students with the best education that ultimately cultivates future CUNY leaders.

Although Rabinowitz admits that CUNY administration is working to recruit black and Latino faculty members, there have been no notable developments.

After 40 years of protesting and waiting, faculty members and students are standing up for change.

Giordano ended his speech with saying, “I recommend a more revamped hiring system that is more inclusive than ever before to offer our students the education they deserve.”

CUNY Professors Hit with Major Reduction in Teaching Hours

by Stacy Kim

By Stacy Kim

CUNY and the Professional Staff Congress have come to an agreement to implement a reduction in the current faculty teaching load of 21 credit hours.

PSC has announced that the change is intended to “enable professors to devote more time to individual work with students, to advising, holding office hours, conducting academic research, and engaging in other activities that contribute to student success.” This change is scheduled to be implemented over three academic years beginning in 2018-2019 and will reduce the mandated credit hours assigned to faculty members from 21 to 18.

Workload reduction has long been proposed by faculty members and will apply to all community colleges, senior colleges and full-time classroom teaching faculty of CUNY. By fall of 2020, faculty at 11 senior colleges will be teaching 18 credit hours per year. At seven community colleges, the teaching load for instructors will be 24 credit hours.

The change is intended to help both instructors and students, and to ensure that students gain more opportunities to connect with professors. PSC also hopes that the change will enable professors to focus on their research while developing a closer bond with students.

“This agreement recognizes that faculty work encompasses critical elements in addition to classroom teaching, better positioning our faculty to address critical responsibilities such as student advising and mentoring,” PSC President Barbara Bowen stated. “Multiple studies show that the single most important academic factor in student success is time spent individually with faculty.”

One study is a report from The American Council on Education, which claims that student success is largely attributed to the effectiveness of the faculty members instructing them.

In June 2016, CUNY and PSC settled the last collective bargaining agreement and convened a joint labor management committee designed to address faculty’s teaching workload. Both parties are working toward creating a new contract.

Dr. David Jones, a political science professor at Baruch College, has joined a task force comprising other faculty members with the goal of maintaining research-driven faculty, spending more time with students and preserving the reassigned time for research.

Prior to the new workload agreement, Baruch had its own system to help promote faculty research called research reassigned time. Research reassigned time allowed faculty members to teach three fewer credit hours and dedicate an equivalent amount of time to research for the same pay.

Therefore at Baruch, the workload agreement will benefit some faculty members who have not done as much research and have not been receiving research reassigned time.

Nonetheless, faculty members who had gained from research reassigned time will not reap any benefits from this incentive as the agreement will not change or improve their current arrangement, which may be a demotivating factor. The decision by Baruch’s administration will have the effect of aligning all faculty’s teaching credit hours across the board. So most faculty will be teaching the same amount of credit hours per year.

Jones believes that the key to creating a productive classroom environment is to motivate faculty members to do more research that they can bring into the classroom. He feels that it is imperative to set a plan that preserves the principle of reassigned research hours and allocates them in a fair way.

Additionally, Jones has pointed out how full-time faculty members in other schools, such as Rutgers University, teach four courses per year, whereas CUNY professors are obliged to teach seven courses a year with nearly the same compensation.

Another challenge is identifying a source of funding. With fewer people teaching and PSC unwilling to pay the cost associated with the new policy, the school has the responsibility to hire faculty members and potentially cover significant costs.

Bowen insists that CUNY faculty need “a better contract.” “The members of the PSC have been told for decades that there is not enough money to fund CUNY adequately or to fund fair contracts for the faculty and staff,” she said.

Compared with other institutions, CUNY’s faculty members are underpaid, which reduces the chances of attracting the best professors and staff to the various campuses. She believes that offering higher wages is the key way to improve the university’s educational system.

A task force, established after the May Faculty Senate meeting, is working to provide the fairest way to distribute faculty research time. The first task force committee meeting is scheduled for Sept. 24. In the meeting, Baruch’s president, Mitchel B. Wallerstein, will present his goal for faculty workload reduction.

Stacy Kim September 20, 2018

Apple and Spotify Trade Bitter Words over Fees

by Stacy Kim

By Stacy Kim

8 April 2019

Spotify has filed antitrust complaints against Apple to the EU, accusing them of “locking Spotify and other competitors out of experience-enhancing upgrades.” Although it is yet to decide whether Apple will go through a formal investigation by European Commission, the growing tension between Apple and Spotify led to dissent among users of the services worldwide.

 

This helps explain why Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, wrote the statement laying out unfair treatment made by Apple.

 

In his post, Mr. Ek discussed a few examples of what Apple required of Spotify and other digital services: “Apple requires that Spotify and other digital services pay a 30% tax on purchases made through Apple’s payment system, including upgrading from our Free to our Premium service. As an alternative, if we choose not to use Apple’s payment system, forgoing the charge, Apple then applies a series of technical and experience-limiting restrictions on Spotify. For example, they limit our communication with our customers.”

 

Spotify, the music streaming service, is striving to provide users with the best audio experience, keeping their price as low as possible for the consumers. However, under Apple’s restrictions, Spotify will have to increase the price of Apple music, with the dwindling number of its users. Spotify is consistent in reinforcing the idea of creating the healthy ecosystem where a win-win negotiation is fulfilled.

 

In response to Spotify’s antitrust claims, Apple, which has brought a dramatic change in mobile-phone industry, says something very different. “After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem – including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers – without making any contributions to that marketplace.”

 

Apple emphasized that all the transactions to purchase digital goods outside the app are not charged by Apple and they are aiming to build a successful ecosystem that will benefit both businesses and users. 

 

By saying, “Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue,” Apple makes clear that Spotify has been wrong for claiming that  there is no fair competition. 

 

In the meantime, Apple pointed out Spotify’s unfair treatment of artists. Since Spotify put a heavy emphasis on keeping their price competitive, they are also “making money off others’ work,” leading to regression in music industry. 

 

A dispute between Apple and Spotify has aroused concerns from users: “The iPhone users, including lead plaintiff Robert Pepper of Chicago, filed the suit in a California federal court in 2011, claiming Apple’s monopoly leads to inflated price compared to if apps were available from other sources,” according to the article “U.S. Supreme Court Weighs antitrust dispute over Apple App Store” by Andrew Chung. 

 

Spotify and many other makers of apps are at the risk of losing more than hundred million iPhone users if they withdraw from the App store. Spotify claimed that Apple is trying to harm their business. If Spotify’s complaint is accepted for an investigation, Apple is likely to be fined by the European Commission. The ultimate goal is to cultivate a healthy ecosystem that works to the best of both companies.