One of world's largest lithium battery power plants is on fire near Monterey, California. Catching up on this week in the LA fires. David Lynch tribute.
I forgot to say I didn't even know these things existed until about an hour before doing the program. Massive lithium storage batteries on the grid? I had NO idea.
What happened in LA is an example of climate whiplash. My favorite weather blogger, Daniel Swain, writes about the overarching weather context of the LA Fires, a subject he knows well, as he’s a co-author of a brand new paper about the topic of "climate whiplash.” The graphic at the top of the page provides a look at the astounding number of recent events [10 big ones!] involving drastic fluctuations between exceptionally wet weather and exceptional dry weather.
Hydroclimate volatility on a warming Earth, Daniel Swain, 1/15/25.
Insurance policies are being cancelled en masse in much of California, including the hilly parts of my town, Berkeley, vulnerable to both wildfires as well as flooding/muslides. I read about this constantly in a a local web page, Next Door. This is happening in lots of areas around the US which are particularly climate sensitive.
The entire narrative of "alternative energy," "Green New Deal,"... is shuck jive, a scam to boost the profits of many corporations and to facilitate further social control. About EVs and batteries, see
Who Killed the Electric Car & more importantly, the Electric Truck? Alice Friedemann, 1/1/25.
Preface. Who cares about electric cars? Civilization ends when trucks stop running. Trucks can’t run on batteries because they’re too heavy (93% of the cargo weight, 25% of the cargo space), and an all-electric truck fleet would require thousands of new power plants, mostly running on finite fossil fuels. But could batteries be improved enough to use in trucks, or even cars? This post makes the case that the obstacles are overwhelming.
And where’s the electricity? The U.S. would have to double today’s electric grid if 66% of all cars are EVs by 2050 (Groom 2021, NREL 2021). Yet the electric grid is falling apart, will be increasingly affected by climate change, and since wind and solar construction depends on fossil fuels for every step of their life cycle, their construction will be constrained by energy shortages due to peak oil likely happening in 2018 (chapter 2 in Life After Fossil Fuels and here).
And a debunking of the entire concept,
Between the Devil and the Green New Deal, Jasper Bernes, in Issue 2 of Commune Magazine, Spring 2019.
How Do We Know that Humans Are the Major Cause of Global Warming?
Published Jul 14, 2009 Updated Jan 21, 2021
And an explanation of how the rate of change in the average global temperature has been accelerating, and a listing of the numerous processes which play a role of positive feedback, i.e. accelerating the rate of change. The current rate of change, by the way, is unprecedented in the planet's history.
Guy McPherson’s big essay, Climate Change Summary and Update, last update August 2016.
"Observations from the geological record show that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now at their highest levels in at least the past 3 million years. Furthermore, the current speed of human-induced CO2 change and warming is nearly without precedent in the entire geological record, with the only known exception being the instantaneous, meteorite-induced event that caused the extinction of non-bird-like dinosaurs 66 million years ago. In short, whilst atmospheric CO2 concentrations have varied dramatically during the geological past due to natural processes, and have often been higher than today, the current rate of CO2 (and therefore temperature) change is unprecedented in almost the entire geological past."
CO2 is not the only "greenhouse gas" being emitted in growing amounts via human activity, particularly industry. Some of them are in fact more potent than CO2, though they occur in smaller amounts.
Yep, Highway 1 at this point is right along the shore of Monterey Bay. First time i saw Moss Landing was on the last day of a 10 days drive which took me from my family's place in New York City, with my packed-to-the-gills car to my new home area in the SF Bay Area. I made a detour to visit Monterey, then drove 1 up the coast to Santa Cruz and then Highway 17 to where my brother and his new wife were living. My first experience of Highway 1, outside a short segment in Venice Beach, while visiting Southern California with my parents, August '67.
I watched Twin Peaks when it was on TV. That was when I did have to wait a week to see the next episode.
I am going to spend the weekend re-watching the 3 seasons in honor of David Lynch.
The lithium battery fire, my worst fear. If I'm afraid of it, why weren't
the "experts" afraid of it. Are they so blinded by their hubris that they are
right about "green" energy, that they will put human and animal life in mortal
danger? Are the Masters of the Universe so nightly that they have brainwashed
the councilman from the new conference to fear climate change so much and
want sustainable green energy that now it is possible at least 2,000 families had to flee their homes, and may never be able to live in them again because of the toxicity?
(East Palestine was revisted on Steve Bannon's War Room Thursday the 2 hour morining show. It will infuriate you.)
I read the last lithium battery fire lasted 11 days. You can't put it out with water.
I'm disgusted and disheartened.
I agree with you (I failed HS Chemistry, but I have common sense and it has been 50 years since I've been in HS) the particles from the spraying in the sky is landing on vegetation and homes causing them to be highly flammable. The intensity of the fire is from that, not from climate change.
And lastly, I have shared Elizabeth Nickson (she being a bonafide journalist) here before. She is most definitely an expert in the dark side of the environmental movement and has a personal relationship with it because of where she lives in Canada.
Here she explains the bottom line that has been a growing danger since 1970's
Regarding chemtrails, Reinette Senum is working with a team of volunteers to collect samples of resultant precipitation and get them analyzed in a lab. They've been doing it for a year or more, and tracking the aircraft that spray, and are preparing a lawsuit. They've got a lot of information at this point. Here's Reinette's substack, in case you haven't come across her yet: https://reinettesenumsfoghornexpress.substack.com/p/skies-under-siege-how-were-dragging
I drive school buses and sometimes people wonder if eventually there would be electric ones like big trucks . Our mechanics state that the buses would only hold a charge long enough for our morning runs, lasting about 3 hours. It would take an enormous amount of electricity and time just to recharge each bus for the afternoon runs, also lasting about 3 hours. . If I’m correct, we have about 50 big buses, 25 vans, some are spare vehicles in case one breaks down or has a safety issue. . Wrap your head around the power needed to get them ready each and every school day. Impossible.
Currently my city has been running electric buses since 2021, both public and school transportation. Public transportation has seven fully electric buses made by Proterra battery-electric buses. The only issue has been the stability of the manufacturer and the ability to get warranty coverage for chassis defects. The issue is not the battery having to be charged after the morning run, which high speed chargers have them ready for the afternoon, but safety from the axle separating from the frame.
This was determined to be a manufacturer defect as it has happened in Philadelphia as well as other locations. The seven buses are currently mothballed while the Proterra chapter 11 works out, waiting to see if they will be covered for replacement, be able to get repair/replacement or get screwed in asset protection as the parts of Proterra are sold off.
The diesel electric hybrids are doing fine and they added five to replace the five full electrics removed from the road.
Also the huge batteries would have to most likely be held under the entire floor of the vehicle. A regular big school bus already weighs close to 15 tons. Cannot imagine and I don’t want to.
The weight is likely why the Proterra buses frames separated from the axles, plus where I live, on a drained swamp, the pot holes are gorges. It probably would run fine in the flat desert where no yearly road hazards develop. The machine was not designed for the combination of road hazards and weight.
We have not seen that; all a nuclear power plant does is boil water and then there are thousands of tons of spent plutonium and uranium laying around for aeons with nowhere to put them. Even if they could assuredly control the reactions, which they cannot; and even if human error were not a factor, which it is; the waste is such an issue that it's even the one thing my father concedes is a problem that has no solution. Currently the patch is to leave it on-site at the plant. Some of the waste products have a half-life of millions of years, and they are all radiotoxic.
In NY, the reactor right on the Hudson River's Haverstraw Bay, is packed beyond what it can hold and was never designed to store waste at all. All this sits about fifty miles up river from the Metropolis. They also have a bad safety history with many radiation leaks, primarily tritium gas.
The waste stays on site even after the reactors are decommissioned, forever realistically, with the containers having to be changed out due to corrosion in less than a generation.
Nice calming Intro music. Appreciate the chill in all the heat....another stormy day here in the Australian bush. A good day to catch up on your prodigious output this week. Thanks, brother.
I forgot to say I didn't even know these things existed until about an hour before doing the program. Massive lithium storage batteries on the grid? I had NO idea.
What do you think about the EPA's announcement that it has found exactly zero chemicals in the air outside of the battery storage facility on fire? Today's press conference: https://www.ksbw.com/article/epa-testing-chemical-residue-air-moss-landing-fire/63468705
Well, the question is, did they even look for chemicals associated with that kind of release? Or did they look for something else?
A Violent Yet Flammable World
By Au Revoir Simone
Oceans shape the sides
Touching down in the spaces
Soaking from a warm goodbye
An early rise offers kindly
Tonight I sleep to dream
Of a place that's calling me
It is always just a dream
Still I cannot forget what I have seen
The crowd's hard to believe
At their faces I'm looking
But your feet I'm following
In soft steps on a path the way you lead
I don't want to lose myself
It's a whisper
It's a funny thing
We fold like icicles on paper shelves
It's a pity to appear this way
You're flying when your foreign eyes
Trace the heights of the city
Steaming
With rocks and clouds we breathe
Violent skies
A shock to my own body
Speech is wild
Alive sacred and sounding
Wild
From across and beyond, oh far beyond
I don't want to lose myself
It's a whisper
It's a funny thing
We fold like icicles on paper shelves
It's a pity to appear this way
Hold, hold, hold on
I swear I saw it somewhere
Waving, waiting, one, two, three, above the wakes that follow
Hold, hold, hold on
I swear I saw it somewhere
Waving, waiting, one, two, three, above the wakes that follow
I don't want to lose myself
Tonight I sleep to dream of a place that's calling me
It's a whisper
It is always just a dream
It's a funny thing
Still I cannot forget what I have seen
We fold like icicles on paper shelves
With rocks and clouds we breathe, a shock to my own body
It's a pity
Alive sacred and sounding
To appear this way
From across and beyond, oh far beyond
Great tune, and a great performance of it.
Update with some harrowing video
https://www.ksbw.com/article/smoke-cloud-moss-landing-battery-plant-california/63459540
What happened in LA is an example of climate whiplash. My favorite weather blogger, Daniel Swain, writes about the overarching weather context of the LA Fires, a subject he knows well, as he’s a co-author of a brand new paper about the topic of "climate whiplash.” The graphic at the top of the page provides a look at the astounding number of recent events [10 big ones!] involving drastic fluctuations between exceptionally wet weather and exceptional dry weather.
https://weatherwest.com/archives/43181
Hydroclimate volatility on a warming Earth, Daniel Swain, 1/15/25.
Insurance policies are being cancelled en masse in much of California, including the hilly parts of my town, Berkeley, vulnerable to both wildfires as well as flooding/muslides. I read about this constantly in a a local web page, Next Door. This is happening in lots of areas around the US which are particularly climate sensitive.
The entire narrative of "alternative energy," "Green New Deal,"... is shuck jive, a scam to boost the profits of many corporations and to facilitate further social control. About EVs and batteries, see
https://energyskeptic.com/2025/who-killed-the-electric-car/
Who Killed the Electric Car & more importantly, the Electric Truck? Alice Friedemann, 1/1/25.
Preface. Who cares about electric cars? Civilization ends when trucks stop running. Trucks can’t run on batteries because they’re too heavy (93% of the cargo weight, 25% of the cargo space), and an all-electric truck fleet would require thousands of new power plants, mostly running on finite fossil fuels. But could batteries be improved enough to use in trucks, or even cars? This post makes the case that the obstacles are overwhelming.
And where’s the electricity? The U.S. would have to double today’s electric grid if 66% of all cars are EVs by 2050 (Groom 2021, NREL 2021). Yet the electric grid is falling apart, will be increasingly affected by climate change, and since wind and solar construction depends on fossil fuels for every step of their life cycle, their construction will be constrained by energy shortages due to peak oil likely happening in 2018 (chapter 2 in Life After Fossil Fuels and here).
And a debunking of the entire concept,
Between the Devil and the Green New Deal, Jasper Bernes, in Issue 2 of Commune Magazine, Spring 2019.
https://communemag.com/between-the-devil-and-the-green-new-deal/
"Twin Peaks" is set in Washington, actually filmed in North Bend, 30 miles east of Seattle.
Here is an explanation of how increasing CO2 levels lead to an increase in global average temperature.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-global-warming/
Info on how we know that the increased amounts of CO2 are due to human activity, a "fingerprint"
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/are-humans-major-cause-global-warming
How Do We Know that Humans Are the Major Cause of Global Warming?
Published Jul 14, 2009 Updated Jan 21, 2021
And an explanation of how the rate of change in the average global temperature has been accelerating, and a listing of the numerous processes which play a role of positive feedback, i.e. accelerating the rate of change. The current rate of change, by the way, is unprecedented in the planet's history.
Guy McPherson’s big essay, Climate Change Summary and Update, last update August 2016.
https://guymcpherson.com/climate-chaos/climate-change-summary-and-update/
See here for a graoh of the current rate of change via past eras.
https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2021/11/why-war-on-climate-change-is-bipolar.html
Why The "War" on Climate Change is Bipolar, Erik Michaels, 11/6/21. Links at the page.
And, a December 2020 statement from The Geological Society of London:
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsl/jgs/article/178/1/jgs2020-239/593602/Geological-Society-of-London-Scientific-Statement
"Observations from the geological record show that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now at their highest levels in at least the past 3 million years. Furthermore, the current speed of human-induced CO2 change and warming is nearly without precedent in the entire geological record, with the only known exception being the instantaneous, meteorite-induced event that caused the extinction of non-bird-like dinosaurs 66 million years ago. In short, whilst atmospheric CO2 concentrations have varied dramatically during the geological past due to natural processes, and have often been higher than today, the current rate of CO2 (and therefore temperature) change is unprecedented in almost the entire geological past."
CO2 is not the only "greenhouse gas" being emitted in growing amounts via human activity, particularly industry. Some of them are in fact more potent than CO2, though they occur in smaller amounts.
https://guymcpherson.com/?s=greenhouse+gases+&apbct__email_id__search_form_94690=94690
By that mean if phones can blow up and take off your leg then extrapolate.
there must be dozens of these things across the state and many many more across the country. they are REQUIRED in every power plant in California.
And all over the world
How could the battery fire NOT have been foreseen???
Ask Elon!
The fire was in the Phase one building, which is LG batteries, not Tesla. Either way, Elon will say something like "Success is not guaranteed"....
Life's Good!
I need to score a government contract for an astrology plant that can serve 500,000 people.
🤣
🤣
Though it's not like there haven't been Tesla-connected battery fires aplenty.
They have fire suppression and it appears to have worked, and contained the fire to the building. So it does seem it was foreseen...
The power plant complex is pretty separated from everything else around it. Right on Highway 1.
Right up on the coast?
Yep, Highway 1 at this point is right along the shore of Monterey Bay. First time i saw Moss Landing was on the last day of a 10 days drive which took me from my family's place in New York City, with my packed-to-the-gills car to my new home area in the SF Bay Area. I made a detour to visit Monterey, then drove 1 up the coast to Santa Cruz and then Highway 17 to where my brother and his new wife were living. My first experience of Highway 1, outside a short segment in Venice Beach, while visiting Southern California with my parents, August '67.
I just finished listening to this show.
I watched Twin Peaks when it was on TV. That was when I did have to wait a week to see the next episode.
I am going to spend the weekend re-watching the 3 seasons in honor of David Lynch.
The lithium battery fire, my worst fear. If I'm afraid of it, why weren't
the "experts" afraid of it. Are they so blinded by their hubris that they are
right about "green" energy, that they will put human and animal life in mortal
danger? Are the Masters of the Universe so nightly that they have brainwashed
the councilman from the new conference to fear climate change so much and
want sustainable green energy that now it is possible at least 2,000 families had to flee their homes, and may never be able to live in them again because of the toxicity?
(East Palestine was revisted on Steve Bannon's War Room Thursday the 2 hour morining show. It will infuriate you.)
I read the last lithium battery fire lasted 11 days. You can't put it out with water.
I'm disgusted and disheartened.
I agree with you (I failed HS Chemistry, but I have common sense and it has been 50 years since I've been in HS) the particles from the spraying in the sky is landing on vegetation and homes causing them to be highly flammable. The intensity of the fire is from that, not from climate change.
And lastly, I have shared Elizabeth Nickson (she being a bonafide journalist) here before. She is most definitely an expert in the dark side of the environmental movement and has a personal relationship with it because of where she lives in Canada.
Here she explains the bottom line that has been a growing danger since 1970's
WATER RIGHTS. That's what it's all about.
https://substack.com/@elizabethnickson/p-154552308
Regarding chemtrails, Reinette Senum is working with a team of volunteers to collect samples of resultant precipitation and get them analyzed in a lab. They've been doing it for a year or more, and tracking the aircraft that spray, and are preparing a lawsuit. They've got a lot of information at this point. Here's Reinette's substack, in case you haven't come across her yet: https://reinettesenumsfoghornexpress.substack.com/p/skies-under-siege-how-were-dragging
I drive school buses and sometimes people wonder if eventually there would be electric ones like big trucks . Our mechanics state that the buses would only hold a charge long enough for our morning runs, lasting about 3 hours. It would take an enormous amount of electricity and time just to recharge each bus for the afternoon runs, also lasting about 3 hours. . If I’m correct, we have about 50 big buses, 25 vans, some are spare vehicles in case one breaks down or has a safety issue. . Wrap your head around the power needed to get them ready each and every school day. Impossible.
Currently my city has been running electric buses since 2021, both public and school transportation. Public transportation has seven fully electric buses made by Proterra battery-electric buses. The only issue has been the stability of the manufacturer and the ability to get warranty coverage for chassis defects. The issue is not the battery having to be charged after the morning run, which high speed chargers have them ready for the afternoon, but safety from the axle separating from the frame.
This was determined to be a manufacturer defect as it has happened in Philadelphia as well as other locations. The seven buses are currently mothballed while the Proterra chapter 11 works out, waiting to see if they will be covered for replacement, be able to get repair/replacement or get screwed in asset protection as the parts of Proterra are sold off.
The diesel electric hybrids are doing fine and they added five to replace the five full electrics removed from the road.
Those diesel/hybrid sounds like the way to go but not sure of the costs. I’m sure it’s a factor in our school district .
Also the huge batteries would have to most likely be held under the entire floor of the vehicle. A regular big school bus already weighs close to 15 tons. Cannot imagine and I don’t want to.
The weight is likely why the Proterra buses frames separated from the axles, plus where I live, on a drained swamp, the pot holes are gorges. It probably would run fine in the flat desert where no yearly road hazards develop. The machine was not designed for the combination of road hazards and weight.
Our area in NY in NYS is very hilly.
yep we are real hillbillies.
Nuclear is the safest and most reliable source of energy.
But, no, let’s tend towards unreliable solar & wind and massive unstable battery farms.
We have not seen that; all a nuclear power plant does is boil water and then there are thousands of tons of spent plutonium and uranium laying around for aeons with nowhere to put them. Even if they could assuredly control the reactions, which they cannot; and even if human error were not a factor, which it is; the waste is such an issue that it's even the one thing my father concedes is a problem that has no solution. Currently the patch is to leave it on-site at the plant. Some of the waste products have a half-life of millions of years, and they are all radiotoxic.
In NY, the reactor right on the Hudson River's Haverstraw Bay, is packed beyond what it can hold and was never designed to store waste at all. All this sits about fifty miles up river from the Metropolis. They also have a bad safety history with many radiation leaks, primarily tritium gas.
The waste stays on site even after the reactors are decommissioned, forever realistically, with the containers having to be changed out due to corrosion in less than a generation.
Nice calming Intro music. Appreciate the chill in all the heat....another stormy day here in the Australian bush. A good day to catch up on your prodigious output this week. Thanks, brother.
Damn, that song is irresistible. :-)