This man, making Christmas calls from the White House, believes the world is a sphere. And he has even flown around it! So has our beautiful FLOTUS, who happens to be his wife!

Truth and common sense must be valued by us, as individuals, in order to lastingly disempower the authoritarian fake news media. This includes the perniciously smarmy science media, which never answers for its errors and lies. I believe that the media has been responsible not only for leftist pathologies like scientism, medical fascism, and radical gender ideology, but also for reactionary movements like modern flat Earth, rejection of all medicine, and Biblical geological literalism.

Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Thank God Thursday Open Thread, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Theistic Evolution Thursdays, due to the author’s expected “pontification” about his scientific, religious, and political opinions. You are welcome to pontificate back! Free speech matters!

Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.

The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.

And yes, it’s THURSDAY…again.

And that’s it. We’re done stealing from Wheatie.

OK – maybe her rules need to be posted.

• No food fights.
• No running with scissors.
• If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.

Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.

If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!

W

Why Current Electric Vehicles Suck As “Reliable” Transportation – And What Might Be Done About It

We were discussing electric vehicles here, when Aubergine made an important point – quite bluntly, the superiority of internal combustion engines at simply getting the job done.

Dude, I live in Montana. Until an electric vehicle reliably runs in -20 degrees, can go several hundred miles without a charge, and can be easily repaired in the middle of a wheat field, they are not going to work here.

Gasoline and diesel engines are practical, EVs are not.

Some of this is inherent to the technology. Gasoline and diesel oil doesn’t lose energy availability at low temperatures, but batteries DO. This is a well-established problem with electric vehicles (EVs).

LINK: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2025/02/10/heres-which-evs-fare-the-best-in-frigid-weather-tests-show

Note Aubergine’s point about “easily repaired in the middle of a wheat field” – and just consider the simple “repair” of bringing a gallon or two of gasoline to a vehicle which has run out of gas. Yes, there are electrical options – but the equivalent of walking for a gallon of gas isn’t one of them. The closest thing is calling in a jumper truck instead of a tow truck. This shows how much convenience is given up by leaving the simple, long-solved convenience of the internal combustion engine.

But it gets worse.

Barkerjim posted a link to a really great analysis, showing why EVs will NEVER be “quick fill-ups” using the current technology.

LINK: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/07/04/why-your-ev-wont-fill-up-in-five/

The TL;DR is this.

ChiCom-sponsored brag science is claiming they have a new battery that can basically solve all the problems of EV batteries. The oh-so-trustworthy Huawei is saying the battery can give ranges of 1800 miles and a 5-minute recharge.

Really?

You mean THIS stuff is solved?

Sorry – not really.

The reality is quite problematic, and Willis Eschenbach explains why.

But, as usual, reality is hiding out in the fine print, ducking the spotlight while the PR machine does its victory lap. Nobody wants to talk about physics. Nobody asks how, exactly, you’re supposed to pour Niagara Falls through a garden hose.

I urge you to read the article.

And it STILL gets worse. As SteveInCO pointed out:

Left unsaid in all of that is the fact that that cable is NOT very flexible. So you’re going to have to park far away from the charger just to have enough flex in the cable to be able to attach it to your car. And it will still take two hours to charge your car because it’s only 1/24th of what you need.

The reason this problem doesn’t already exist at supercharging stations is that the car is only charging up for 300 miles, not 1800 miles.

This is where my mind typically gets BIOS-booted back into “utter basics of batteries” mode – where we just look at the chemistry of “redox” – meaning “oxidation and reduction”.

Rust, fire, human metabolism, copper cleanser, and batteries, are all examples of redox. Oxidation and reduction is what batteries do, only with rerouting of the electrons into an electrically useful pathway, instead of “just heat”. The battery is an ingenious perversion of fire, one might say.

And yet, this.

Batteries are – fundamentally – just chemical reactions. And that has consequences.

Interestingly, the inverse is also true.

Direct chemical reactions can be viewed as ultimately short-circuited, failing batteries.

And it gets bigger. Planet sized, in fact.

The biosphere on Earth is a kind of giant, solar-charging battery. Plants are the key – the thing that makes the battery, resulting in biocarbon and oxygen. Land plants store the energy as wood and oxygen.

The oxygen part of the battery encompasses the entire planet, which is a bit of a mind-blower, and has some amazing implications. The wood part of the battery may degrade to coal or petroleum, but either way, sunlight creates a giant charged battery. That battery can then discharge through FIRE. And, that fire can be converted to electricity.

California could take advantage of this giant battery, and turn its wood problem into money, but under intellectual “progressive” lightweights like Gavin Newsom, that can’t happen. Sad.

The internal combustion engine is the same, only it uses really old wood. AND – in a strange sense – it’s like an EV that works through battery discharge of heat, and not by any direct electrical intervention.

Now that I’ve loosened up your mind a bit about what is a battery and what is a chemical reaction, let’s look at why internal combustion is such a great type of EV.

Can We Use The Great Oxygen Battery Component?

For one thing, the internal combustion battery takes advantage of atmospheric oxygen as the “oxidant” part of the battery. That is a huge part of the battery weight that does not have to be hauled around. That part of the battery is already wherever you want to be.

Likewise, the discharged part of the battery (CO2 and H2O) is simply ejected into the shared global atmospheric battery, where these substances can be recycled by the solar generator (plants) and converted back into wood and oxygen.

Yeah, take a moment to savor the beauty of what God hath wrought through “just” the Schroedinger equation and the periodic table!

BEAUTY PAUSE.

Ok, back to stuff.

If we’re going to stick with lithium (or similar) batteries, the electrical vehicle is always going to be stuck with hauling ALL of the battery around. Both the oxidant and the reducing agent are going for the ride. And THAT includes the “used” oxidant and reducing agent. The full battery – even the discharged stuff – is going for the full ride, and is being hauled around by the good stuff.

SO – my first point – is that it sure would be nice if the EV battery could use oxygen as the oxidizing agent.

JUST SAYIN’.

This needs research, and isn’t a quick fix. But it offers future possibilities.

So setting that ambitious point aside, let’s go back to the points made by Willis and SteveInCO.

Can We Make Electricity Delivery Fast Like Gasoline?

How can we make gas service station stops SHORT and SWEET?

IMO, moving back toward a SHARED BATTERY like the atmosphere can work in several ways other than oxygen. One way would be to make the fuel something that you can just load into the car quickly and drive away. If car batteries were more like rechargeable device batteries – meaning they just slid in and out of vehicles – then energy stops would pretty much be as fast as racing pit stops, if one needed a fresh, charged battery. Just swap batteries and move on down the road.

With a scheme like this, the infrastructure for charging batteries could be located either in service stations, or nearby. Charging on the road becomes something that is done away from the consumer, except when home charging.

Note also that “swap-in” battery units can be very smart and the latest tech. The latest battery tech becomes a lot like the grade of the gasoline. Even better, the battery becomes something that can change technologies quickly, evolving faster than the vehicles themselves.

Battery units can be “self-warming” to get maximum energy release. They can be delivered warm and ready to work on the coldest day. They can keep themselves warm, as needed. They become their own thing – less of a concern for most drivers.

My most important point, however, has nothing to do with the chemistry or electrical technology.

Let All Batteries Fight It Out

To recover the innovation of “non-gasoline batteries”, we have to AVOID both unnecessary regulations and subsidies. Let these technologies compete, so that they can evolve. It is my contention that subsidies have distorted the technology of electric vehicles. EVs are not convenient in certain ways, because the “technosphere” of EVs had one focus of its geometry moved too close to individuals and their homes, due to subsidies administered through individuals.

That approach worked for a while, but it has led to technology which has limited the growth of EVs, and has held EVs back from being the industry that they could have been. Microsoft – for all its problems – knew that it had to create an ecosystem around itself, and let other forces drive significant parts of that ecosystem. EVs need to do the same. Off-loading “batteries” and “battery service” into largely separate industries that others can monetize and innovate in, could be the right move here.

Let gas and coal compete – and at all levels of organization! IMO, coal-powered vehicles like Teslas have a great future, especially as nuclear-powered vehicles. However, they will need to go through growing pains.

As Trump likes to say…..

Thank you for your attention to this matter (and energy)!

W