Electric vehicles are often touted as the green alternative to gas-powered vehicles, but one expert believes that if people knew the truth about EVs, they would think twice before purchasing one.
Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA operations officer and host of the podcast "The Wright Report," told Fox News Digital that electric vehicles pose environmental problems, national security issues and compromise the safety of drivers, making them a less than desirable alternative to gas-powered vehicles.
Wright said that one of the most important things to consider when buying an electric vehicle is whether they are actually green. It is his belief that they are actually quite "dirty." Starting with their batteries, he explained that thousands of pounds of minerals, including cobalt, lithium and nickel from all around the world have to first be extracted.
The Congo is the source of 70% of the world's cobalt. Of that, about a third come from miners who are "mostly kids," Wright said.
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"That is a horrific thing, imagining these child miners pulling this stuff out of the ground to make our green cars go, but that is true," he said. "Also, we know about the 19 cobalt mines in the Congo, 15 of them are controlled by the Chinese government or a Chinese entity."
Lithium mostly comes from Australia, but a large amount also comes from the Atacama Desert in South America, also known as the lithium triangle, Wright said. The lithium mining process is problematic for the region because the land is extraordinarily dry, but the lithium extraction requires large amounts of water, requiring about 500,000 gallons needed to produce a single ton, he explained.
Because water is such a coveted resource in the region, Wright said it has caused tension in the region between governments, mining companies, and local, especially indigenous people, about how the water should be used.
"We are removing the one critical resource by a lot of those indigenous folks down there, so we can have our green and clean car," he said.
Nickel, which is also vital to EV battery production, primarily comes from Indonesia and is extracted using sulfuric acid, but he said the way the metal is mined poses environmental problems.
There are two different approaches to mining nickel, one involves an energy-intensive process that requires coal-fired furnaces, which he said is damaging to the Indonesian environment and its people and the second is through chemical extraction using sulphuric acid. Once you've finished mining for nickel, it needs to be disposed of either in tailing ponds or dried and stacked both of which pose environmental problems.
Just through the extraction process, he explained, there is the exploitation of child labor and environmental damage. But then, the minerals are sent to China, where about 80% of the batteries' raw materials are refined.
"But that's just the beginning," Wright said. "We haven't even gotten into the car to start to drive."
"So imagining we get into that car, we have a few different concerns," he continued. "First, we've got a national security concern, that car is basically a computer on wheels. So as that thing drives, it's going to both get things downloaded to it or you're going to upload stuff to whatever your car manufacturer might be. That opens up a major vector to be hacked or otherwise controlled."
While Wright said that might sound impossible or unlikely, he pointed to a move by Ford Motor Company last March when the company filed for a patent that would use self-driving capabilities to repossess a vehicle if an owner becomes delinquent on their loan. He warned that in the future, people might not actually be in control of their vehicle, leaving them at the mercy of hackers or their car company.
Wright also said China owns the EV industry and the "dirty green world."
"We know that they own a lot of the mines — whether it be nickel or cobalt in places like Africa, India, Indonesia — they control about 80% of the refining of those minerals for the batteries," he said.
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"But then if you start looking at the manufacturing, what Beijing has done is they are subsidizing the companies that create these vehicles," and "because they've got those subsidies, they can create really, really cheap cars," he added.
Wright said the Chinese Communist Party is subsidizing the EV companies because they're trying to de-industrialize Europe and the United States.
"They're trying to crash our economies by flooding the market with very, very cheap products so that we can't compete, whether that be because of our labor costs or environmental rules or otherwise," he said. "We are already seeing this, as a lot of Chinese companies are now moving their production to Mexico to try to then flood the North American market."
Wright said the U.S. is going to lose some of its own manufacturing plants if the government doesn’t either impose tariffs on Chinese EVs or block them from entering the U.S. market through Mexico.
"It is just one more reason why it's crazy to allow China to engage in the world economy in the way that we do," he said. "China absolutely is dominating this industry, and they will continue from batteries to solar panels to these EVs, and you will watch factories in this country shut down because of it."
Wright also said coal powers EV production in China and pointed out that the nation uses slave labor in regions like Xinjiang and elsewhere.
"You've got people who are living in concentration camps forced to build out the infrastructure for these EVs," he said. "We should stand up and say that it's wrong. We should block this stuff from ever coming into the United States."
"We need to be pointing out the hypocrisy of, gosh, we're creating dirty green EVs using coal or cobalt from the Congo and child labor, but it's also true that they're using concentration camp labor," he said. "All of this has to be a part of the conversation for when people walk into that dealership. What am I really buying?"
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In addition to the fact that EVs are a national security concern, Wright said they have also proven to be less safe on the road and more expensive to maintain when compared to their gas-powered counterparts.
"Now we're driving down the road, nobody's hacked us yet, and we have a couple of other concerns to think about," he said. "One, this [EV] car is very heavy. Much, much heavier than a traditional vehicle and that means that your tires are gonna wear down about 20% faster than a gas-powered vehicle. That's going to cause more damage, obviously, for your pocketbook as you have to replace your tires. It's also going to cause a lot more damage for the roads and the bridges."
Wright also said EVs are a lot more dangerous than a gas-powered vehicle or diesel-powered vehicle, simply because of the weight of the batteries. He explained that EVs are so much heavier than gas-powered cars, that there is up to a 47% higher chance of a driver dying if they crash an EV or are hit by an EV, according to data from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Despite increasing EV criticism, the Biden White House has continually touted electric vehicles as the way forward, releasing a fact sheet on Wednesday that announced public and private commitments to support America’s historic transition to electric vehicles. President Biden plans to have 50% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030. The administration states the commitment by the government and private companies will "spur domestic manufacturing, strengthen supply chains, boost U.S. competitiveness and create good-paying jobs."
But, Wright believes the U.S. should be wary of EVs and the national security risk they pose if China is allowed to dominate the industry.
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"At the end of the day, EVs are not just about the environment, it's about national security, and if we allow China to dominate this industry, as we have, and then allow them to flood our markets … this is going to not just be a problem about climate change, this is going to be an economic disaster, and we need to be honest and talk about it," he said. "So I sure hope that that's why folks understand why I'm so interested in it, why I'm so passionate about it."
"As a former CIA officer, I care about national security and this is one of those vectors where Beijing is using it to try to weaken us and ultimately destroy us, and while we can be agnostic, like it or not, in terms of the EV infrastructure or the cars themselves, there is a national security component to this, and we need to talk about that," he said.
