When Stupid Reigns

Friday, January 9, 2026

While we are “celebrating” the anniversary of fires, we cannot forget the Moss Landing fire of last January in Monterey County, CA.  Unlike the wildfires of Southern California, this was a “Battery Energy Storage System” (BESS) fire – basically an EV fire writ large, and we all know how very nasty those are.  Inextinguishable they must be contained and left to burn themselves out and they leave behind a toxic, nasty mess.  Moss Landing has become one of the bigger projects of the E.P.A.’s list of clean-ups.  And yet, the installation of these type of facilities continues apace.

BESS are supposed to be the missing link in the whole wind and solar thing as they store energy and put it back in the system when wind and solar are not generating – like at night and when there is no wind.  And yet, to my now old mind, they constitute a complete corruption of the so-called “environmental movement.”

I lived in the Cleveland Ohio metropolitan area in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire.  I was young, but it was not merely a news story in my life.  My father worked nearby.  I was first worried about his safety and later irritated by the disruption the fire caused to the normal workings of the city.  (Few things irritated this sixth grader more than telling him dinner was going to be late.  When the Batman reruns and Speed Racer cartoons were over, it was time to sup.)  I was also fascinated by the oxymoronic notion that a river could catch fire.  And thus my interest in chemistry was sparked.  It ended up a college major and turned into a profession.

That river burned for a simple reason – a large variety of flammable materials, less dense than water and therefore floating, that were discharged into the river by the variety of industrial facilities that lined the river were ignited.  Such practice may have been innocent enough when the industrialization of the area began as the rivers and Lake Erie were well capable of absorbing the materials and destroying them naturally.  But by 1969 the amounts being dumped were enormous and natural processes could no longer meet the challenge.  The event sparked the formation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that such industries began to handle their hazardous waste materials in a manner more suitable.

Now we fast forward 50 years and “environazis,” as Rush Limbaugh used to call them, have decided that the problem is not merely the uncontrolled discharge of flammable materials, or material acutely hazardous for other reasons, but that carbon, the atomic basis of life itself, is the problem.  And therefore seek to not merely force industry into controlling discharge, but want to force the entire world economy away from organic chemicals – full stop.  Weird as that is, they wish to do so by the introduction of systems, processes and materials that are far, far more toxic and harmful to human life than anything dreamt of in 1969.

The Moss Landing fire was relatively benign because of its isolation.  It emitted a cloud of highly toxic smoke and created a highly toxic slag heap, that were it in an urban, or other densely populated situation, would have significantly endangered thousands of lives and been a massive, massive issue.

And so it was utterly astonishing to me that such BESS are being placed in denser settings and plans exist to put them right smackdab in New York City.  If one of those things go up big, and they are catching fire somewhat routinely (Funny, I cannot find anybody collecting stats on BESS fire incidents, but I do read about them every couple of weeks,) the results will make the Cuyahoga River fire look measly.  Not only is the likelihood of such a fire spreading to nearby structures very real, but such a fire will result in the large scale evacuation of the immediate and downwind area and leave behind a slag heap that will have to be surrounded by a Chernobyl-like “Exclusion Zone” until it is fully and completely cleaned up.  Such a fire in an urban area could displace thousands of people for more than a year.

The environmental movement was a response to a pollution based fire in a dense urban area.  Now, sixty years later, they want to create conditions that can result in such a fire.  At what point may we conclude that they are mad?