Former CIA officer warns Biden’s electric vehicle agenda is a national security threat that could “ultimately destroy us.”
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.
“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.Â
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.
