Morning Midas
© Watts Up with That
On June 4, 2025, the Morning Midas — a cargo ship loaded with over 3,000 vehicles, including approximately 800 electric and hybrid models — was left adrift in the Pacific Ocean after catching fire 300 miles southwest of Alaska's Adak Island. Thankfully, all 22 crew members were safely evacuated. But the fire, reportedly starting on the vehicle deck, overwhelmed the vessel's onboard suppression systems and forced a total abandonment. The ship, flagged under Liberia and en route from China to Mexico, now floats like a ghost vessel — a monument to the hazards of our increasingly electrified obsession.

This latest incident is more than just a maritime mishap. It's a warning. A costly one, literally and figuratively, about the technological delusions driving climate-centric energy policies.

Let's not mince words: the proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) is a politically engineered phenomenon. It's not market demand but bureaucratic fiat, massive subsidies, and regulatory cudgels that are flooding global supply chains with lithium-ion batteries. And when these batteries go up in flames, they don't just emit smoke — they torch the narrative that this energy transition is safe, sustainable, or rational.

The Lithium-Ion Fire Problem: Not Just a Technical Glitch

According to The Times, "The fire broke out on the vehicle deck of the ship, which is carrying electric vehicles that contain lithium-ion batteries, a type of battery known for being difficult to extinguish once ignited." Fire suppression systems failed to contain the blaze — just like they did in similar disasters, including the Felicity Ace, which sank in 2022 along with 4,000 vehicles after a battery-related fire.

As The Washington Post notes,
"Lithium-ion battery fires are notoriously hard to extinguish. They often require immense volumes of water and can reignite even after appearing extinguished. Once a fire begins on a cargo ship, especially one carrying EVs, the danger multiplies."
None of this is surprising to those who've been paying attention. Lithium-ion batteries, the workhorse of the EV movement, are not merely flammable — they're energetic time bombs under the right conditions. They're prone to thermal runaway, a fancy term for "you can't put the fire out once it starts." This is not a minor engineering inconvenience. It's a fundamental flaw of the very core of the so-called clean energy revolution.

This event highlights, yet again, the hubris of the technocratic caste who believe that spreadsheets, slogans, and subsidies can override physics and chemistry. The push for EVs has never been about sound science or market viability — it has been a triumph of ideology over evidence. And it's average people, logistics networks, and now even global shipping routes that are paying the price.

The Morning Midas fire is a maritime echo of policy arrogance: a floating allegory of what happens when top-down climate mandates ignore the inconvenient details. These details include not only the fire risk of EV batteries but also the human cost of cobalt mining, the environmental degradation of lithium extraction, and the limited recyclability of these so-called green technologies.

And to reiterate, this isn't even the first time a ship has been sacrificed at the altar of climate policy. As The Wall Street Journal notes,
"In 2022, the Felicity Ace, carrying thousands of EVs including high-end brands, caught fire and eventually sank in the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in the loss of vehicles valued at over $400 million."
What did we learn? Apparently nothing.

One might expect policymakers to pause and reconsider the wisdom of forcing an electrified fleet onto the world. Instead, incidents like this are met with silence or worse — more deflection and rhetorical gymnastics about how such setbacks are just "growing pains." If a fossil-fueled cargo ship carrying traditional cars went up in flames this regularly, you can bet there'd be a parade of headlines and UN statements calling for the end of internal combustion engines.

But when EVs ignite, the media response is muted. Why? Because to question the safety of EVs is to question the entire green transition — and that is a heresy punishable by cancellation.

Let's be clear: no one is suggesting that lithium-ion batteries be banned. What's being demanded is honesty. It's one thing to promote EVs in a competitive market that values performance, price, and safety. It's another to enforce their adoption through regulatory compulsion while ignoring their very real dangers.

The fire aboard the Morning Midas is the logical outcome of a world governed by narrative rather than nuance. Climate policy today operates more like a religion than a science — complete with saints (Greta), sinners (Exxon), and sacraments (Net Zero). It elevates technologies to sacred status without demanding proof of their safety, scalability, or superiority.

The global shipping industry is already grappling with draconian emissions targets and bureaucratic overreach. Now, it's being asked to risk floating battery farms across oceans, all to appease climate prophets in Geneva and Brussels.

We need a serious reassessment. Not more subsidies. Not more mandates. A real, skeptical, evidence-based appraisal of where this so-called transition is actually leading us.

Because if the goal is to save the planet, setting fire to it with lithium doesn't seem like the smartest route.

H/T Mike, John W, recukeet, Walter S, and "someone"