This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Ben Lieberman is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) where he works on energy and environmental policy. He was counsel to the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce and worked for the Heritage Foundation. 

Federal Newswire

Will electric vehicles be the great promise some claim they will be?

Ben Lieberman

It all comes back to freedom of choice and consumer choice and allowing people to purchase and use the products they want, and to not have the federal government mandating choices. That's true of the push from gas to electric stoves. It's true of a similar push from gasoline powered to electric powered vehicles. The consumer demand beyond a niche product just is not there.

Federal Newswire

Is the most efficient way of allocating resources to use market forces?

Ben Lieberman

Absolutely. Even if it wasn't the most efficient, it's what people want. We respect freedom more than one-size-fits-all efficiency. Of course, the one-size crowd never achieves any kind of efficiency, but the real issue is that every consumer is different. For a well-to-do person who already has a gasoline powered car, they can use an EV for short trips [and] that's fine.

But say, for the one-third of American households that are single-vehicle households, including many lower income ones, an EV just can't serve as that one vehicle. There are a lot of examples of people who logically don't want to choose an EV. This push towards an all-EV world leaves a lot of folks behind.

Federal Newswire

Is any one-size-fits-all approach sound as government policy?

Ben Lieberman

If gasoline powered vehicles were on the market, the central planners would be trying to push them onto the market. A lot of people don't know, actually, that the gasoline-powered vehicle was considered an environmental benefit when it came out. Cities had thousands and thousands of horses back in the day, which means horse manure, horse urine, [and] dead horses all over the place.

One day the gasoline-powered vehicle came along. It was a tremendous improvement in public health. We forget those things...The gasoline powered vehicle [is very convenient]. [There are] 150,000 gasoline stations across the country, you can pull up in five minutes, get enough juice or get enough fuel to go 400 miles.

That's a tough act to follow. I would like to think that the EV proponents have respect for people's time, but it's clear that they don't.

Federal Newswire

Was a concern for public health behind the idea of banning gas stoves?

Ben Lieberman

Well, the first thing that strikes me as suspicious about all these claims of a public health danger is that gas stoves have been very common since the middle of the last century. I grew up around one. You probably grew up around one. 100 million or more kids grew up around one. [The fact] that there's some dire threat that we have noticed until lately strikes me as strange.

The other thing is that the people claiming [there is a] gas stove and asthma link are joined at the hip with the climate activist community, which is putting hundreds of millions of dollars into this effort to electrify homes. The same people who want to stop using gasoline are in favor of electricity in vehicles. They want to do the same thing for natural gas used for stoves or water heaters or furnaces. In our homes towards the electrification of everything.

Natural gas is three times cheaper on a per-unit energy basis. It doesn't make economic sense, and it doesn't even make environmental sense, because the electricity has to be generated somewhere and we're decades away, if ever, from a wind-dominated grid. 

Federal Newswire

If there is an issue with generating enough power, doesn't that mean someone is going to control whether or not you can use electricity at any given time?

Ben Lieberman

Absolutely. I think it's not a crazy conspiracy theory that this is an agenda being advanced by people who want more control over our lives. There's no other explanation for all the things being done, which I mentioned make no economic sense, but don't even make that much environmental sense. I think in many ways, climate change is a pretext for things that a lot of folks left of center have been wanting to do for decades.

Federal Newswire

Are we not supposed to use the methane and benzene and other distillates that come out when a petroleum molecule is cracked?

Ben Lieberman

The things that we get from a barrel of oil is a very long list. They really have not thought through all that it will mean for the economy, for all the things that make modern life possible. It isn't just a matter of not making gasoline for our cars and not making natural gas for our homes. Almost everything around the home can trace its origins to a petroleum or natural gas product. There's a lot of bad news on the horizon if this agenda is allowed to continue.

Federal Newswire

Where will these policies end up?

Ben Lieberman

I think the bad news generally is that the private sector seems all too resigned to all of this. Maybe the worst example is the auto industry's response to the EV agenda, when they must know that EVs are going to be a hard sell. [However,] they went along anyway. There's a lot of that going on.

When you don't have the pushback from the regulated industries, then where can it come from? Free market groups like CEI [are] not that well funded or [do not have enough of a] powerful voice. I think the reality in the end is this stuff just doesn't work. A grid dominated by wind and solar is not going to happen.

EVs dominating the roads is not going to happen. Everybody giving up their gas stoves is not going to happen. The practical realities are going to bring this agenda to an end. The concern is how much damage will have been done when we reach that point.

Federal Newswire

Is this a ‘regulatory state’ problem?

Ben Lieberman

The federal regulatory state is just one big Stockholm syndrome. You're absolutely right. It's the comprehensiveness of it all. You can't fight one regulation because that agency and other agencies have you under their thumb for other regulations where they have discretionary authority. It is tough to fight back. Another factor is balkanization.

California will set their auto regulation point, their own appliance regulations, and manufacturers don't want to have to build a different set of standards for California or the dozen or so copycat states. They come running to Washington. What I don't like about that is,  whatever California does is almost always [adopted by the federal government]. 

Do we really want the federal government to mandate that foolishness on the other 49 states or however many states who didn't want it? Why do regulated industries not fight back?Sometimes they benefit at the expense of their competitors. That's why the focus should always be on what's best for the consumer and what's best for the homeowner, and what's best for the larger principles of freedom.

Federal Newswire

How about the application of all of this with China?

Ben Lieberman

There are so many ways that the climate change agenda plays into China's hands. [China is] where so many batteries and components for the EV batteries are going to come from. Maybe the most egregious example is that China still gets classified by the United Nations as a developing nation under these climate treaties. I'm talking about things like the 1987 Montreal Protocol, but mainly the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which really kicked off the International climate agenda. Now, you could argue back in ‘87, back in ‘92, China really was a developing nation. Classifying them as one might have made sense back then, but the classification was never changed.

Fast forward to today, China is the world's second largest economy, the world's largest exporter, the largest emitter of many of the things that are the subject of these treaties. They still get treated as a developing nation, which gives them a very clear, unfair advantage over the U.S. and other developed nations for a number of reasons.

Federal Newswire

What are the implications of this disparate treatment?

Ben Lieberman

Well, for one thing, under these treaties, developing nations get more lenient treatment. For example, the 1987 Montreal Protocol...banned freon and made air conditioners more expensive. Developing nations received an extra 10 years to keep using Freon, and in addition, some of these chemicals are also used in manufacturing processes.

Using the older, better chemicals is something that Chinese manufacturers can do that the U.S. based or other developed-nation manufacturers can't do. There's a clear advantage in terms of weaker compliance. For the climate change provisions, China can still use affordable, reliable coal-based electricity. They're taking full advantage, even as the U.S. and European nations are moving away from coal towards more expensive and more intermittent sources.

Of course, higher energy costs could be a real advantage for American manufacturing, but we're throwing away that advantage by allowing China to continue to use low-cost coal when we increasingly have to shut down those plants...Also, believe it or not, these treaties have foreign aid provisions and multilateral funds...that allow developing nations and poor countries to get compliance assistance from rich nations. Surprise, surprise, the U.S, is the biggest contributor to the UN overall, and is the biggest contributor to this foreign aid. China can get assistance from U.S tax dollars to help them move ahead with this advantage over us. It's really that bad.

I would add that the amount of the aid in these multilateral funds [is] not tremendous. We're talking millions, not billions, but the fact that it's anything is particularly repugnant given China's conduct..

Federal Newswire

How can this advantage be neutralized?

Ben Lieberman

China should not be treated as a developing nation. This should have been changed long ago. Finally, the Senate has taken some action. There are provisions most recently in the National Defense Authorization Act that would require the State Department to request that the UN change China's classification. That's a welcome step. 

I think the next step is for legislation, and there's a bill by Senator Barrasso of Wyoming that would defund these treaties until China is reclassified as a developed nation.