What makes a battery so very different from a tank full of gasoline?

 Both store energy right? That is perhaps as far as the casual observer ever gets in thinking about it.

There is of course a tremendous difference.  Once the gasoline is consumed - that's the end of the energy storage system for combustion engine powered automobiles.  What remains is an empty metal or plastic tank (HDPE in the US).  Both materials having been designed over the years to survive all but the most extreme crashes.  Plastic is preferred as it is lighter and more malleable in the event of an accident and therefore is less likely to leak.  What then is so different about an EV battery pack?  Its case is rather inert too isn't it?

The dead, completely out of charge batteries still contain an enormous amount of stored chemical energy.  Chemical energy that can be ignited various ways with extremely dangerous results.  Let's take a closer look.

A typical automotive EV battery pack stores 75 kW of electrical energy when fully charged.  That's around 270 million Joules of electrical energy.  When it is completely exhausted it still has 25 million Joules of chemical energy that thermal runaway can emit.  A completely charged pack can emit both energy types and can liberate 400 million Joules!  

So you see there is a profound difference in how these propulsion system choices work and what they can do.  Read on!

So let's think about what 25 and 400 million joules looks like in a real world example The minimum and maximum effect of a battery pack thermal runaway like some Volvo EX30s are experiencing globally right now. The lower the state of charge the "safer" the situation. 

25 million Joules is akin to a large bon-fire burning for about an hour.  You probably don't want that to happen anywhere near your home or in a parking garage.  This is why repair shops often require EV's that need repair to be stored safely away from anything flammable.  So if your EV has a fender-bender park it away from anything flammable until the manufacturers technicians can tell you that the battery pack hasn't been damaged and you are safe to continue using your car.  By the way many manufacturers play it safe and condem a pack that has been in a car that was in an accident.  So new battery, not under warranty.  So DO NOT GET INTO AN ACCIDENT!  

400 million joules - that's a local TV news worthy event. Radiant heat would be felt tens of meters away, fire fighters need proper gear to get close to it, suppression will take hours and anything near it could be blasted by jets of flame.  A bad day for everybody. 

But that's not all.  The fumes are often MORE dangerous than the flames. Hydrogen fluoride is made during the combustion of the battery pack which can burn your lungs, eyes and exposed skin. Human respiratory failure can happen even hours after exposure.  If you cant get free of the fumes just a few breaths at high concentration will kill you.  There is also carbon monoxide, cyanide compounds and acidic aerosols from pack materials.  Lastly, metallic particulates get airborne from lithium salts, nickel, cobalt and manganese battery components.  The smoke often fills an enclosed space in seconds.  By the way, the toxic cloud may be lethal to breath 50 meters or more down wind from the conflagration.  Some of these toxins are odorless so be careful!

Fire departments consider an EV fire Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health (IDLH) and only approach the scene with HAZMAT gear which is de-contaminated after use.    People who have been exposed to some degree of exposure and survived report, a burning sensation in their throats and chest, temporary blindness, nausea and shortness of breath that gets worse with time.  Some of these toxins could effect your quality of life for the rest of your life. 

So understand the risks you are taking and what you need to do if you decide to go the EV route or if you see an EV on fire.  Stay far away,  Even an e-bike fire in your apartment can be lethal. This is why laws are being put in place to bar the storage of e-bikes in apartments.

There's a different way of reacting to an EV fire than the old fashioned gasoline powered car, e-bike or e-scooter.  A leaking gas tank may catch fire or not.  Can usually be extinguished in minutes, if not stay away from the vehicle because any burning car can liberate foul toxic fumes of various species.  But Ev fires involving the battery packs present an especially serious situation.  Now you know.  

Another year older NLO

 Happy B-Day... I remember it like it was yesterday.

 

AML Dad 

Merry Christmas to all of our friends in the East

 

Christ is Born

Let us all pray for peace!  

Happy New Year 2026

 Zoooom, another year flew by.  Another chair disappears...

The thing about "musical chairs" is that it's not democratic. It is raw ambition, sneaky and it generally lacks negotiation or compassion for the players left standing.  There's a lot to be learned from this game.  

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mOy9f1lfFpg

The world's contestants fighting for their energy chairs exhibit a profound lack of empathy.  Hmmm, people like that have been at the center of most of the disastrous expressions of evil the world has yet seen.   Stay tuned.

The phrase "Lack of Empathy, the Father of Evil" is a prominent concept derived from the observations of Captain G.M. Gilbert, an American psychologist assigned to the prisoners at the Nuremberg trials after World War II. He concluded that a lack of empathy was the single characteristic connecting all the Nazi defendants. 

If we look around these days we see many such examples.   Sadly.

Blessed Christmas Wishes

During this Christmas Eve, my hope is for our peace, even though there are so many who have never wanted that, my hope is for our good health, happiness in your families and prosperity in your lives.  Whoever you, my visitor are and no matter where you live, I wish for peace and kindness in your lives my friends.  

Our friends in the East will celebrate on the 7th of January.  May the good Lord guide, bless and protect us all from the madness in this world.

Can a large scale organization of humans even become sustainable?

Let's wrestle this down from a historical perspective.

Humans on this planet have never achieved long term sustainability.  Gulp. That's right, we have formed big groups... like ancient Egypt, the Inca Empire, the Edo Period and Nabatean civilizations but guess what?  They all collapsed and for different reasons.. So let's contemplate the assist we are enjoying by copious abundant feedstocks of energy and how those who came before us still managed to reach an apex without that gift and still collapsed.  What about our enormous energy overhang and billions of people with no real survivability skills? Worlds biggest correction will happen - maybe in a generation, maybe sooner if knuckle headed decisions are made. We have an insatiable focus on financial machinations as the mechanism for fixing everything.  We have not evolved.

Historians cite, environmental exploitation, overshoot, complexity and the lack of long term planning to adapt to the plethora of threats out there as the most common reasons for societal collapse.  

So when we speak of sustainable anything we are really projecting wishful thinking - just an ignorant proclamation in defiance of our history or maybe we are invoking a carefully chosen marketing trope. It sounds great to investors even if it isn't possible.  PT Barnum would be proud.

Sustainable isn't the same as survivable, or adaptable and many small, independent and geographically lucky in the world's history have been in the right place at the right time and managed to evolve.  But a planetary sustainable culture after oil?  Never has happened so perhaps the strategy of the realist should be reductionist, independent and organic in concept and execution. Small, resourceful and peaceful wouldn't hurt either.  Circular economies, purpose driven innovation and the ending of wasteful diversions of talent and energy seem like great ideas to explore.  Seems like financialization has to finally go away too - but that's just my view of things.  Think, what were successful communities doing in 1860? 

Just something to think about when the rubber finally hits the road. Sustainability is simply - a canard. It's a little bit of Edward Bernays scammery mixed in with that irresistible financialization addiction the West loves. Adaptability and survivability actually mean something.  That's where we need to focus our thoughts, and we should change (correct) the language as best as we can to focus on what is real and achievable.  How to remove waste in policy and our world while building towards adaptation of life with less cheap energy and eventually, very little energy.  There you go - your homework assignment for 2026. What can you do to reduce your energy dependence by 50%?   That would be an excellent start! What adaptations could you make, substitutions and modest lifestyle changes?  Intriguing thought isn't it?  

How sustaining are energy dependent institutional policies?

 Like many things that are obvious that we learn in our life's walk, lack of any given resource forces us to adapt, to do without or simply to discard an old way.  The same is true for digitally based methods we now accept or foresee as having an indispensable role in our world view or how we envision life to be. Energy hungry add ons won't last the test of time.  

So things like digital currency will most certainly become a reality, but how sustainable is that? Full surveillance money or programmable “social credit” wallets probably will have a short life in human history. Policy surrounding these advances is increasingly shaped by data modeling, risk management and so called experts with their biased algorithms intended to drive profits for somebody, which after all are programmed by people with that agenda.  All of these massively energy dependent initiatives are underpinned by carefully selected bureaucratic incompetence which makes life easy for the "lobbyist".  Looks like a bumpy road to go down with an eventual end that is unsustainable do to energy allocation, competition or depletion simple over the next generation or so.  

So get ready for increasing economic strain, institutional decay as governments continue to run on emergency bylaws, opaque technological creep, political polarization and general instability that comes from no clearly enunciated direction. What the Chinese call "Interesting Times." 

If you assume, governments lie most of the time,  multinational corporations act in self-interest and media always filters reality to their handlers approval... you’re being realistic and maybe just a bit better prepared than the average person. So don't expect to become informed by the systems that see no problem with the way any of these technological evolutions advance. After all, even the "news" is a for profit entertainment show staffed with actors reading story lines they really have no idea about of any depth in. Checkers not chess, commercials and lots of smiles. Not much intellect or honesty either.

So what can YOU do? Be vigilante and try to protect what gets measured because that's what becomes what matters - at least in public discourse and through your democratic processes.  The unpleasant stuff that isn’t measured gets ignored.  Maybe it needs to be or maybe it doesn't.

Watch for politicians and influencers of any stripe that all come from similar schools, share assumptions, circulate through the same institutions and most importantly, review and validate each other. It is easy to spot this kind of short sightedness or group incompetence or dare I say it "corruption"... be looking for stuff like dissent being labeled “uninformed” rather than a valid democratic mechanism. Watch out for credentials replacing accountability and policy that  shields the expert class from accountability for propagating a false narrative.  In this miasma status insulation has been enough to start the downward civic rotation.

Once a system gets built around a comfy clan, careers depend on it staying that way, getting funding depends on allegiance to it, and institutions grow to depend on it. So - hard to correct large corrupt systems because they have a self preservation protective posture.  When reality diverges from the narrative, data can always be reinterpreted, assumptions can be quietly adjusted, and as always, critics are framed as lunatics.  LOL, so corruption is epistemic, not just financial. Too big to fail.  

(Epistemic corruption is the breakdown of a knowledge systems integrity where it becomes unreliable for its intended purpose due to manipulation from external interests. 

This occurs when systems for producing or disseminating knowledge are co-opted by motives like financial gain, political power, or career advancement, which are at odds with their core goals.) 

Popular examples include how the pharmaceutical industry can corrupt medical science through funding and product-defense science can skew climate research. 

We are, I am afraid reaching a point where we experience highly complicated (complexity) regulation, mostly compiled by financial industry lobbyists, this new energy hungry world requires expertise to navigate and favors the insider EVERY time. This will, again I am observing, allow for corporations to influence public policy rules whilst public influence largely in the dark and unaware weakens if you don't participate in making your voice heard.  This can look like a neutral system when in fact it can become the mythical wolf in sheep's clothing. Surrogate endpoints instead of real-world outcomes seem to be the only reported news. The public can feel unheard and without a mechanism to instigate democratic change. But don't give up on your democratic processes.  

This can be an abrogation by policy optimization of what’s easiest to measure as defined by somebody else's metrics rather than the voting public. So keep informed, vote and write a letter or two.  Those people who create complexity make a ton of money on adventures that don't have to make any sense at all.  Why should they care as long as the money comes in. There is a shocking reality by the way, but I digress.

Expert class insulation seems to be growing as buying the right credentialed expert is offered as dismissal to the public forum.  So these days, opinion can become science (not the scientific method) and questioning can become mis-information. So we now have status insulation NOT scientific discourse.  Know the difference.

Lastly, the inequality and resulting harms we now see have largely been reframed as “acceptable tradeoffs”, abetted by careers, grants of money, and built reputations that depend on systems which if questioned or abandoned would lead to professional $uicide for the influencers.  So don't look for a lot of internal reform anywhere a paycheck is based on keeping a head down!    

We didn't need a grand conspiracy, or evil actors or even secret meetings to get here - but all of that does/did help.  Transparency is a strong antidote to corruption and we need more of it. What we do have are systems that incentivize blindly following a narrative, we have baked in career monetary pressure to advancement, risk aversion of reprisal on an individual level and the centralization of expertise from the approved "chosen" pool of "smart people" which makes change even harder as first the incumbent rhetoric has to dismantled. All of this while the media is largely co-opted.  The systems we have created self selects for conformity, keeps a cloak of secrecy over motives and tends to filter out the unabashed truth-tellers, even when everyone believes they’re acting ethically.  These absurdities grew from an energy rich world, and allowed the squandering of talent and resources. In a lean mean, no room for BS world they would not have blossomed to this magnus opus.  

So energy and the policies that surround its distribution are as complicated as anything else.  Keep informed, share your thoughts, work for a better tomorrow.  Failure to grasp the significance or even create university degrees in adaptive anthropology or survivability technology - which dont exist, might actually put the right talent on solving the right problems. Wouldn't it be amazing to see a debate on energy policy based on trained research in these areas?  Nope, opinion after opinion and decision makers largely unaware.