The former CIA officer and podcast host warned that EV policies are a wealth transfer that hurts America’s working class and could ultimately wreck the economy.
Energy experts are warning about numerous potential issues for electric vehicles, including affordability, range, weather, infrastructure and economic concerns, even as the government and car companies increasingly push them on Americans.
Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA operations officer and host of the podcast “The Wright Report,” told Fox News Digital that American society has shifted to EVs largely because some people are “just so hellbent on making sure that this transition happens, even if that means wrecking the economy, in terms of electricity, its reliability, the grid, getting brownouts or blackouts or economic wreckage by people who otherwise can’t afford these new vehicles.”
“That cost is being shouldered by buyers and car companies by raising the price of gas-powered vehicles, [which] is basically just a direct wealth transfer, just paying for EV subsidies and that will grow over time, if we continue to keep this regime in place,” Brent Bennett, a policy director for Life:Powered, an initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told Fox News Digital.
California, Wright said, is likely a “really sad test case” for what the rest of the country could face, where he said it currently costs about $250 an hour to service an EV. The state has made a strong push for EVs under Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Californians will by 2035 not be allowed to buy new gas-powered cars and light trucks.
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“Some of those expenses are going to come down because you’re going to find manufacturing efficiencies and you’re going to be able to lower the cost of that product,” Wright said. “But as of this moment, with all the push, it is a wealth transfer from people who have their current gas vehicles to an EV. I don’t know if that’s going to be the case in 10 or 20 years, but what we see in California is because of some of these dirty green policies.”
Bennett discussed the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs, which he said “is one small part of the whole equation” when it comes to what the government is doing to subsidize EV production.
“We calculated that if you add on the socialized infrastructure costs, and then in particular add on California’s zero emission vehicle mandate, which adds cost to all of us because the automakers have to pay to produce more EVs in California, and they spread that cost to the whole country, the federal fuel economy regulations alone are subsidizing each EV by about $20,000. Add all this together, and each EV is getting almost $50,000 in subsidies,” he said.
Tesla automobile plugged in and charging a Supercharger rapid battery charging station for the electric vehicle company Tesla Motors, in the Silicon Valley town of Mountain View, California, August 24, 2016. (Getty Images / Getty Images)
As a result of these polices, many Californians’ utilities have gone up, which Wright said is only going to continue hurting the lower and middle classes the most.
“The burden of this revolution is it is fundamentally a tax on the working class and on the middle class … a lot of folks struggling in those two worlds and it really is unfair to a lot of the working folks in this country,” he said.
If we continue on the current path, Wright warned of a tremendous amount of economic wreckage in many parts of the country, as well as the world, because infrastructure just cannot support these government mandates.
“At some point we’re going to face this issue of, we don’t have the charging infrastructure, we don’t have enough electricity overnight, we’re going to have to adjust unless we want to crash the global economy,” he said.
Jason Isaac, senior fellow with Life:Powered, said EVs have been pitched as a “gadget” through powerful marketing, but argued people are now re-thinking their decisions after hearing stories about their unreliability. The main reasons are attributable to what he calls “range anxiety,” the lack of charging infrastructure, as well as the high cost of the EVs themselves.
Wright explained how charging and the three different levels of electricity available for EVs complicate the experience for EV owners.
Level one, for example, is what you plug into your wall at home, while level three chargers which are the most powerful, can only be found at the equivalent of a gas station. Level two chargers can be installed in a home, but they cost about $2,000 to $4,000 to install and don’t include the cost of fuel, Wright said. Level 3 chargers, in contrast, are expensive and require significant infrastructure, making them “incredibly difficult” or “impossible” to conveniently build throughout rural America, he said.
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He also warned that people who are able to charge their EV at a plug-in installed in their home will still likely face high electricity bills.
“You’re plugging it in, but you’ve got an electricity bill, and the cost of that is really going to be dependent on where in the country you are,” he said. “You might have very cheap power with nuclear power or hydropower, or you can have very expensive power with solar and wind.”
Also, those who charge their EVs at home tend to use them between the hours of 10 p.m and 6 a.m. when there simply isn’t enough electricity to go around, which could result in the electricity grid crashing, Wright said.
New Tesla electric vehicles fill the car lot at the Tesla retail location on Route 347 in Smithtown, New York on July 5, 2023. (Photo by John Paraskevas/Newsday RM via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Bennett said the “socialized costs of electricity” pose a problem, especially when an EV charging overnight consumes as much power as three to four homes.
In a neighborhood of 80 homes, where everyone has an EV and all of them are charging at the same time, it would be the equivalent of adding four times as many homes to the neighborhood, likely exceeding the neighborhood’s available electrical load.
“Now imagine, instead of over eight hours, you’re trying to charge in 30 minutes on a fast charger,” he said. “Well, now you’re talking about that EV alone drawing as much power from the grid as a small grocery store. You put four of those together at a Tesla supercharging station, you’re talking as much power as a Walmart, so you have to upgrade your electrical infrastructure, your transmission and distribution infrastructure to support that.”
Bennett argued that there are some instances where EVs work well, like as a commuter car, but in a lot of ways, he said they aren’t practical for the average American.
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“Reducing emissions is a good thing, but our government is basically saying, ‘Well it’s all or nothing, it has to be zero emissions or the world ends, it has to be all EVs or nothing,'” he said. “That’s the problem is that we’re creating policy or at least all or nothing types of philosophies.”
Critics of EV technology have been shouted down by the green energy industry and “the media ecosystem,” Wright said. He argued that EV proponents refuse to talk about the shortcomings of the technology because “there are a lot of folks in the White House, in D.C., sadly even some of our car manufacturers, that don’t want to talk about the dirtiness of their vehicles because they don’t want people to know now how disastrous it is.”
New energy vehicles are being exported through a special frame transport at the International Container Terminal in the Taicang Port area of Suzhou Port, in Suzhou, China, on April 19, 2024. (Getty Images / Getty Images)
As for the climate impact, Isaac said he and Bennett have run models and concluded that “decarbonization doesn’t do anything to mitigate a changing climate” but rather just makes everything more expensive.
“I hope the market corrects, I hope that some companies … stop the politicization of capital and actually get back closer to free markets,” he said. “It would also be nice if they would support American energy producers because we produce it more responsibly than anywhere else on the planet.”
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“I think you’re going to continue to see a movement back towards sanity where we just embrace American innovation [and] the technology that we have today that has made us world leaders in clean air,” he concluded.
As a former battery engineer, Bennett said the biggest myth he always wants people to be aware of is the idea that somehow battery technology will improve at a much faster rate than it has historically, which doesn’t happen with energy technology in general and certainly not with batteries.
“Not only are we pushing for net-zero, but we’re doing it in a certain time frame that’s physically impossible to achieve,” he said. “We’ll see batteries continue to improve, but at a very slow rate. Not only that, but it takes ten years to commercialize any battery technology and another ten years to really get it mature to where it has wide market penetration.”
He said the attitude so far has been that by pouring money into EVs, we can speed up innovation, but that it doesn’t work that way.
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“There will be improvements over time, but trying to say that we’re going to do this in the next ten years and trying to force it down our throats is absolutely one of the biggest energy policy blunders we’ve ever made,” he said. “Hopefully, reality is going to hit soon before we spend too much money, waste too much money on this.”
The Biden White House has continually touted electric vehicles and in January released a fact sheet boasting “major progress to electrify the great American road trip.”
“Since the President took office, EV sales have more than quadrupled, with more than four and a half million EVs on the road. EV ownership is more affordable than ever before, with prices down over 20% from one year ago. The number of publicly available charging ports has also grown by over 70 percent, with 170,000 publicly available EV chargers across the country, putting us on track to deploy 500,000 chargers by 2026 – achieving the President’s goal four years early,” the White House said.
