A Video Interlude: About Those Electric Vehicles

This video from the South China Morning Post is almost a year old, but I only now just caught up to it. It shows a row of electric buses in China combusting rather dramatically:

Imagine if you were a passenger on the first bus as it was going down the street, or even stopped at a pickup point, when it combusted. You likely wouldn’t make it out. The point: if not for the hysteria over climate change, and the romanticizing of electric-everything, our various transportation- and safety-czars in the government would never allow these vehicles to be brought into use. One of the first things I teach students on the first day of energy policy classes I have taught is how energy density works, and how a battery is a device to store energy at high densities. But at a certain point, when you increase the energy density enough, we don’t call it a battery any more. We call it a bomb. No wonder the airlines now ask everyone not to check anything with lithium-ion batteries in checked luggage.

Bonus video: Some genius has put together this treatment of Martha’s Vineyard:

That’s some bad hat, Harry!