Hundreds of people were ordered to evacuate and part of Highway 1 in Northern California was closed early Friday after a major fire erupted at one of the world's largest battery storage plants.
The fire started Thursday afternoon and sent up towering flames and black smoke, and about 1,500 people were instructed to leave Moss Landing and the Elkhorn Slough area, The Mercury News reported.
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The Moss Landing Power Plant, located about 77 miles (about 124 kilometers) south of San Francisco, is owned by Texas-based company Vistra Energy and contains tens of thousands of lithium batteries. The batteries are important for storing electricity from such renewable energy sources as solar energy, but if they go up in flames the blazes can be extremely difficult to put out.
This is very unfortunate for many reasons, but especially regarding the current political climate it happened very untimely. This will be spun in all the wrong directions and used as an example...
This is very unfortunate for many reasons, but especially regarding the current political climate it happened very untimely. This will be spun in all the wrong directions and used as an example against renewables.
I feel like anything bad that happens in California is already touted as a 'see this is what liberals get ya' in the media. I have coworkers that regularly bring up problems in California (such as...
I feel like anything bad that happens in California is already touted as a 'see this is what liberals get ya' in the media. I have coworkers that regularly bring up problems in California (such as homelessness, wildfires, crime, and high cost of living) despite us being on the opposite side of the country and none of them having ever been there. Those are legitimate issues, of course, but the fact that they're bringing them up in casual conversation seems pretty indicative of the conservative media they watch/read/listen to.
Oh, conservatives are terrified of California. They are constantly on the lookout for ways to discredit the state for any number of reasons, mainly because they are desperate to discredit the idea...
Oh, conservatives are terrified of California. They are constantly on the lookout for ways to discredit the state for any number of reasons, mainly because they are desperate to discredit the idea that liberal politics works. But perhaps the most frightening thing to them is that there are actually a whole lot of conservative people in the state (there have been endless propositions to abolish state income tax) and regardless liberal policies keep being passed because they are popular.
California has many legitimate things to criticize but it doesn’t really matter because whenever I see someone from out of the state criticize it it’s usually for bogeyman style things that don’t reflect reality.
California has a lot of problems to be sure. One of the problems is homelessness. If you go to San Francisco or Los Angeles you see a lot of it. It's a complicated problem. It's not caused by...
California has a lot of problems to be sure. One of the problems is homelessness. If you go to San Francisco or Los Angeles you see a lot of it. It's a complicated problem. It's not caused by liberals. A major cause is that the weather is mild in those so it's possible to survive most of the year while living outside.
What is a conservative's solution to homelessness? Cut taxes some more and take away more social programs? Put them in jail? Reopen the mental facilities that were closed in 1981? Yell at them and tell them to pull up their bootstraps? Put them on buses and send them to Texas?
It kind of is. The problem doesn't map at all to the left-right spectrum, there's plenty of blame for everyone. The core problem is the lack of dense housing, and LA's inability to build it. There...
It's a complicated problem. It's not caused by liberals.
It kind of is. The problem doesn't map at all to the left-right spectrum, there's plenty of blame for everyone.
The core problem is the lack of dense housing, and LA's inability to build it. There are plenty of solutions, but the homeowners are "bought in" on the system and don't want the problems solved - there's a property tax (good) but it's capped for grandfathered homes, which prevents homeowners from selling because if they do, their tax rates will jump forward several decades. Abolishing property tax (or just switching to a flat tax) might, grotesquely, be an improvement on the current tax that's essentially biased in favor of old money. Please understand that saying this disgusts me. Land taxes are good.
There's plenty of deregulation that could help the situation (note that I'm talking about a theoretical small-govt-wanting conservative; actual MAGA "conservatives" tend to love preserving car subsidies and favourable regulation - although, real conservatives do exist, see Strong Towns) such as abolishing minimum street widths and plot sizes (a smaller plot size means developers have a lower barrier to entry, meaning there are more small developers and thus more competition). Conservatives could implement by-right housing permission (I.e. there are some specs of housing that you don't need to ask permission for, just inform the govt that you're building and then start building). One interesting approach is permitting by-right construction that's slightly above the average height of the surrounding blocks. That way it's always possible to expand local housing supply, if only a little, without adding too-big towers.
Also, conservatives could outright abolish environmental study requirements. If that sounds insane to you, let me ask you a question: how many highways have been cancelled on environmental grounds? Now, compare that to railways (which are basically objectively superior, environmentally), and you realise that environmental studies often aren't about the environment, they're just a weapon to stop development. The sheer scale of Cali HSR delays is amazing, and they're mostly from weaponized environmental legislation, which is farcical. Almost nothing does zero damage to the environment, and so it's really easy to implicitly assume that because the new project will do some damage, then it's worse than the status quo, which implicitly does no damage (lol).
I mostly agree with you. I think where we disagree is that I'm thinking about people in other states who blame liberal policies for homelessness. And I'm saying California isn't as liberal as they...
I mostly agree with you.
I think where we disagree is that I'm thinking about people in other states who blame liberal policies for homelessness. And I'm saying California isn't as liberal as they think.
I don't want to "One True Scotsman" what it means to be liberal, but when it comes to effective policies like dense housing, California isn't really liberal at all. It's very NIMBY and has a lot of entrenched interests that are extremely conservative. Things are pretty much as shown in the movie Chinatown. So mostly California has a veneer of liberalism, similar to a big business that says nice things about marginalized groups and then donates a million dollars to Trump's inauguration fund.
A lot of the problems are caused by Proposition 13 which was an attempt to fix a few things but had a lot of negative side effects for housing costs and tax income.
Still, I think California is doing better when run by Democrats than if more of it was run by Republicans.
I think we just flat-out agree, except for dumb semantics on the definition of "liberal" (which I've been using loosely, and I also don't care about the definition too much). If I had to define...
I think where we disagree is that I'm thinking about people in other states who blame liberal policies for homelessness. And I'm saying California isn't as liberal as they think.
I think we just flat-out agree, except for dumb semantics on the definition of "liberal" (which I've been using loosely, and I also don't care about the definition too much).
If I had to define Liberals in this context, I'd say it means something like "the mainstream vaguely-left-wing-tinged majority in Cali". Which means the majority of Californians are, by definition, liberal. And as always, saying the phrase "by definition" means I'm either arguing semantics, or I'm saying useless irrelevant things. Usually both.
Actually, I think the problem here is that I've been using the root term "liberal(noun)", and you've been using the root term "liberal(adjective)". Your definition of "liberal(noun)" is "those whose ideology/actions are root-term-liberal(adjective)", whereas my definition of "liberal(adjective)" is "like the root-term-liberals(noun)". The root-term-liberals(noun) aren't very root-term-liberal(adjective). In essence, I'm using "liberal" as it relates to "democrat", whereas you're using "liberal" as it relates to "left wing".
Bleh.
I think Cali Republicans, if elected, would do their best to rip out all things that aren't cars, which isn't inherently right-wing but in practice is supported especially by republicans. This would wreck California. They also wouldn't necessarily fix zoning et al, especially since their rallying cry of "freedom" can be trivially switched between 'developer freedom' (from local govt restrictions) and 'local freedom' (to run their local zoning/permitting however they want).
AB 1893 passed last year, and made some big changes in that direction. https://cayimby.org/blog/a-stronger-builders-remedy-ab-1893/ Also, local ordinances are no longer able to block the...
by-right housing permission (I.e. there are some specs of housing that you don't need to ask permission for, just inform the govt that you're building and then start building).
That would honestly help a lot (though I get that conservatives would balk because "mental health is a personal failing"). They were getting funding and better programs in place with the MHSA in...
Reopen the mental facilities that were closed in 1981?
That would honestly help a lot (though I get that conservatives would balk because "mental health is a personal failing"). They were getting funding and better programs in place with the MHSA in 1980 and then Reagan promptly pooped all over it in 1981.
Having a proper facility where inpatients are treated more like people and less like emergency care cases or prisoners would likely reduce the number of schizophrenics and other psychosis-adjacent patients roaming the streets.
Yeah my point is that it would be helpful to have more mental facilities but conservatives would never go for it because it uses tax money to provide a public service. I was also thinking about...
Yeah my point is that it would be helpful to have more mental facilities but conservatives would never go for it because it uses tax money to provide a public service. I was also thinking about the MHSA and here's another article about that
Conservatives do have this really weird habit of creating a crisis and then blaming everyone but themselves for the crisis. See also: The national debt crisis. All they had to do is not cut taxes...
Conservatives do have this really weird habit of creating a crisis and then blaming everyone but themselves for the crisis.
See also: The national debt crisis. All they had to do is not cut taxes on the wealthy.
This is true of other states too. People love to use stories about hurricanes, flooding, or power outages as a news hook to complain about Texas or Florida.
This is true of other states too. People love to use stories about hurricanes, flooding, or power outages as a news hook to complain about Texas or Florida.
Right, everyone knows the oil industry never hurts anyone. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/18/dozens-killed-in-central-nigeria-as-fuel-tanker-explodes But I guess Africa is a country...
Right, everyone knows the oil industry never hurts anyone.
Just adding a little local perspective. This is the second battery fire in 5 years, though this time is much worse. But to all the folks that think it's a good argument against battery plants, it...
Just adding a little local perspective.
This is the second battery fire in 5 years, though this time is much worse. But to all the folks that think it's a good argument against battery plants, it caught fire a few times when it was a natural gas plant too. I think locally folks are mostly worried about the chemical particulate in the smoke - and so far it's been the usual, underserved communities that are taking the brunt of the fallout. Yesterday the smoke was in Salinas Valley, today it's supposedly heading towards Santa Cruz. We could smell a weird chemical smell yesterday in Monterey in the morning, but otherwise it's been fine.
Last thought is that there has been pretty limited information on how much folks should be concerned and what measures anyone outside the evacuation zone or immediate area should take. Neighbors are all talking about that, but by and large everyone is going about life normally.
I live in the area. Our air quality wasn't great yesterday, but it wasn't too bad, considering. What is frustrating about that facility is that it's had issues before, and us locals have had very...
I live in the area. Our air quality wasn't great yesterday, but it wasn't too bad, considering. What is frustrating about that facility is that it's had issues before, and us locals have had very little say about it. It also abuts one of the very few pristine marsh coastlines left in California; localized pollution could have an outsized negative impact. https://elkhornslough.org/
Last November, a grassroots group called Citizens for Estero Bay Preservation sponsored a measure in Morro Bay that put the fate of one of the region’s remaining industrial sites — the beloved and sometimes reviled Morro Bay smokestacks — in the hands of voters. The Morro stacks, 450-foot-tall industrial smokestacks that ceased operations in 2014 because of the environmental impacts of the almost six-decade-old facility, have been a blight for so long they’ve stitched themselves into the town’s identity.
Measure A-24 passed by a 60% to 40% margin to ensure that any decisions on the dormant power plant and surrounding parcels will be put in the hands of voters, not the city council.
The decision was both an “underdog victory” and a “decisive vote” that tells Texas-based Vistra Corp — the same company that owns the Moss Landing plant — that “Morro Bay does not want to be host” to another lithium plant, said community organizer Barry Branin, one of the leaders of the group.
From the article:
…
This is very unfortunate for many reasons, but especially regarding the current political climate it happened very untimely. This will be spun in all the wrong directions and used as an example against renewables.
I feel like anything bad that happens in California is already touted as a 'see this is what liberals get ya' in the media. I have coworkers that regularly bring up problems in California (such as homelessness, wildfires, crime, and high cost of living) despite us being on the opposite side of the country and none of them having ever been there. Those are legitimate issues, of course, but the fact that they're bringing them up in casual conversation seems pretty indicative of the conservative media they watch/read/listen to.
Oh, conservatives are terrified of California. They are constantly on the lookout for ways to discredit the state for any number of reasons, mainly because they are desperate to discredit the idea that liberal politics works. But perhaps the most frightening thing to them is that there are actually a whole lot of conservative people in the state (there have been endless propositions to abolish state income tax) and regardless liberal policies keep being passed because they are popular.
California has many legitimate things to criticize but it doesn’t really matter because whenever I see someone from out of the state criticize it it’s usually for bogeyman style things that don’t reflect reality.
California has a lot of problems to be sure. One of the problems is homelessness. If you go to San Francisco or Los Angeles you see a lot of it. It's a complicated problem. It's not caused by liberals. A major cause is that the weather is mild in those so it's possible to survive most of the year while living outside.
What is a conservative's solution to homelessness? Cut taxes some more and take away more social programs? Put them in jail? Reopen the mental facilities that were closed in 1981? Yell at them and tell them to pull up their bootstraps? Put them on buses and send them to Texas?
It kind of is. The problem doesn't map at all to the left-right spectrum, there's plenty of blame for everyone.
The core problem is the lack of dense housing, and LA's inability to build it. There are plenty of solutions, but the homeowners are "bought in" on the system and don't want the problems solved - there's a property tax (good) but it's capped for grandfathered homes, which prevents homeowners from selling because if they do, their tax rates will jump forward several decades. Abolishing property tax (or just switching to a flat tax) might, grotesquely, be an improvement on the current tax that's essentially biased in favor of old money. Please understand that saying this disgusts me. Land taxes are good.
There's plenty of deregulation that could help the situation (note that I'm talking about a theoretical small-govt-wanting conservative; actual MAGA "conservatives" tend to love preserving car subsidies and favourable regulation - although, real conservatives do exist, see Strong Towns) such as abolishing minimum street widths and plot sizes (a smaller plot size means developers have a lower barrier to entry, meaning there are more small developers and thus more competition). Conservatives could implement by-right housing permission (I.e. there are some specs of housing that you don't need to ask permission for, just inform the govt that you're building and then start building). One interesting approach is permitting by-right construction that's slightly above the average height of the surrounding blocks. That way it's always possible to expand local housing supply, if only a little, without adding too-big towers.
Also, conservatives could outright abolish environmental study requirements. If that sounds insane to you, let me ask you a question: how many highways have been cancelled on environmental grounds? Now, compare that to railways (which are basically objectively superior, environmentally), and you realise that environmental studies often aren't about the environment, they're just a weapon to stop development. The sheer scale of Cali HSR delays is amazing, and they're mostly from weaponized environmental legislation, which is farcical. Almost nothing does zero damage to the environment, and so it's really easy to implicitly assume that because the new project will do some damage, then it's worse than the status quo, which implicitly does no damage (lol).
I mostly agree with you.
I think where we disagree is that I'm thinking about people in other states who blame liberal policies for homelessness. And I'm saying California isn't as liberal as they think.
I don't want to "One True Scotsman" what it means to be liberal, but when it comes to effective policies like dense housing, California isn't really liberal at all. It's very NIMBY and has a lot of entrenched interests that are extremely conservative. Things are pretty much as shown in the movie Chinatown. So mostly California has a veneer of liberalism, similar to a big business that says nice things about marginalized groups and then donates a million dollars to Trump's inauguration fund.
A lot of the problems are caused by Proposition 13 which was an attempt to fix a few things but had a lot of negative side effects for housing costs and tax income.
Still, I think California is doing better when run by Democrats than if more of it was run by Republicans.
I think we just flat-out agree, except for dumb semantics on the definition of "liberal" (which I've been using loosely, and I also don't care about the definition too much).
If I had to define Liberals in this context, I'd say it means something like "the mainstream vaguely-left-wing-tinged majority in Cali". Which means the majority of Californians are, by definition, liberal. And as always, saying the phrase "by definition" means I'm either arguing semantics, or I'm saying useless irrelevant things. Usually both.
Actually, I think the problem here is that I've been using the root term "liberal(noun)", and you've been using the root term "liberal(adjective)". Your definition of "liberal(noun)" is "those whose ideology/actions are root-term-liberal(adjective)", whereas my definition of "liberal(adjective)" is "like the root-term-liberals(noun)". The root-term-liberals(noun) aren't very root-term-liberal(adjective). In essence, I'm using "liberal" as it relates to "democrat", whereas you're using "liberal" as it relates to "left wing".
Bleh.
I think Cali Republicans, if elected, would do their best to rip out all things that aren't cars, which isn't inherently right-wing but in practice is supported especially by republicans. This would wreck California. They also wouldn't necessarily fix zoning et al, especially since their rallying cry of "freedom" can be trivially switched between 'developer freedom' (from local govt restrictions) and 'local freedom' (to run their local zoning/permitting however they want).
AB 1893 passed last year, and made some big changes in that direction. https://cayimby.org/blog/a-stronger-builders-remedy-ab-1893/
Also, local ordinances are no longer able to block the construction of ADUs: https://bbklaw.com/resources/la-100124-governor-newsom-signs-three-new-accessory-dwelling-unit-bills
These are both new legislation, but really should help things going forward.
And I'll believe them when they work.
I can attest to my friend finally being able to put in an ADU after years of their city being a pain, at least!
That would honestly help a lot (though I get that conservatives would balk because "mental health is a personal failing"). They were getting funding and better programs in place with the MHSA in 1980 and then Reagan promptly pooped all over it in 1981.
Having a proper facility where inpatients are treated more like people and less like emergency care cases or prisoners would likely reduce the number of schizophrenics and other psychosis-adjacent patients roaming the streets.
Yeah my point is that it would be helpful to have more mental facilities but conservatives would never go for it because it uses tax money to provide a public service. I was also thinking about the MHSA and here's another article about that
Conservatives do have this really weird habit of creating a crisis and then blaming everyone but themselves for the crisis.
See also: The national debt crisis. All they had to do is not cut taxes on the wealthy.
This is true of other states too. People love to use stories about hurricanes, flooding, or power outages as a news hook to complain about Texas or Florida.
The anti-renewable memes were how I initially learned about it, unfortunately.
Right, everyone knows the oil industry never hurts anyone.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/18/dozens-killed-in-central-nigeria-as-fuel-tanker-explodes
But I guess Africa is a country they don't live in.
Just adding a little local perspective.
This is the second battery fire in 5 years, though this time is much worse. But to all the folks that think it's a good argument against battery plants, it caught fire a few times when it was a natural gas plant too. I think locally folks are mostly worried about the chemical particulate in the smoke - and so far it's been the usual, underserved communities that are taking the brunt of the fallout. Yesterday the smoke was in Salinas Valley, today it's supposedly heading towards Santa Cruz. We could smell a weird chemical smell yesterday in Monterey in the morning, but otherwise it's been fine.
Last thought is that there has been pretty limited information on how much folks should be concerned and what measures anyone outside the evacuation zone or immediate area should take. Neighbors are all talking about that, but by and large everyone is going about life normally.
I live in the area. Our air quality wasn't great yesterday, but it wasn't too bad, considering. What is frustrating about that facility is that it's had issues before, and us locals have had very little say about it. It also abuts one of the very few pristine marsh coastlines left in California; localized pollution could have an outsized negative impact. https://elkhornslough.org/
I always love the section of the train trip that goes through Elkhorn Slough. It's so beautiful.
Moss Landing fire may be death knell for another lithium battery plant on California coast (sfgate)