I saw Obama’s clean energy speech at MIT today. A crowd of students was there — roped off a good distance away from the packed Kresge Auditorium. Inside were luminaries from MIT, state government and local cleantech companies.
Here’s my blog item for Wired about the speech (it includes a good Obama joke about MIT): Obama Spurs Us On In Clean Energy Race.
Land use priorities are usually what come to mind when we think of biofuels and food, but a study involving honeybees shows that we might also want to think about what’s in our food.
High fructose corn syrup, that cheap, hyper-sweet synthetic* sweetener that’s in so much of our food, produces alarming amounts of hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) at temperatures over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. HMF is toxic, and a study looking at HMF from high fructose corn syrup in commercial beekeeping shows that we should be looking at HMF from high fructose corn syrup in human food, too. Commercially produced baked goods should be first on the list.
HMF is also a biofuel precursor. Scientists have been working on ways of cheaply producing large amounts of HMF (see Selective Conversion of Fructose to 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural Catalyzed by Tungsten Salts at Low Temperatures, Simple Chemical Transformation of Lignocellulosic Biomass into Furans for Fuels and Chemicals, and Metal Chlorides in Ionic Liquid Solvents Convert Sugars to 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural).
The study of high fructose corn syrup isn’t likely to help biofuels efforts, but it does illustrate some of the pitfalls of industrialization. One lesson is that simply plugging natural feedstocks (even sustainably produced ones) into the front end of an industrial process doesn’t necessarily result in a sustainable outcome.
* High fructose corn syrup is not an artificial sweetener according to official FDA designations. But neither is it a substance found in nature. It’s made by chemically converting cornstarch.