Today we joined the “green” revolution by taking delivery of a brand-spanking new Ford Mustang Mach-E, EV. It took a year to arrive, but it's indisputably a wonderful car that was worth the wait. It's my wife's car and she'll be using it for her 50-mile round-trip commute to work. We have a charging station at our house and potentially another one at her work. I ran the numbers and we should be able to keep it adequately charged, even in winter, if we are only able to charge it at home. We're good to go.

We're really, really happy with the car. The dealer here in Pocatello treated us well. Even though EVs are in high demand, we got a very fair deal. It's really a nice vehicle. It was expensive, but we believe that it makes great economic sense for our application.

That last part, “our application,” is key, because despite the clamor from the Green New Deal crowd, EVs currently don't make sense for everybody, perhaps not even for most people. And that's not the end of what's on the table with any potential EV purchase. While on the whole EVs are, indeed, “greener” than conventional fuel vehicles, they are not a social or environmental panacea. You need to understand what you are getting into if you are interested in surfing the wave.

The first thing to know is that your odds of completing a successful, stress-free, cross country trip in an EV is quite low with the present state of infrastructure. This has been thoroughly documented in both the motoring and the mainstream press. EVs take a while to charge — even with a fast charger (which you should not use all of the time anyway) and there's no guarantee that you aren't going to have to wait in line for a charge. It's not at all like pulling into a gas station and being in and out in five minutes.

This won't be the vehicle that we use to visit our in-laws out of state.

The second thing that you need to think about is that while an EV is, indeed, emission free as it goes down the road, the electrical energy that propels is almost certainly not emission free — and is unlikely to be so anytime in the near future. On balance, you are producing less emissions as you drive than you would in a traditional vehicle. But absolutely no mass-produced EV currently on the road can claim to be “emission free.” All you are doing with any EV is transporting the source of emission away from the car to the point of origin for the electricity — albeit with an improvement in efficiency.

EVs also use surfeits of rare earth materials that are often mined in terrible places under terrible circumstances. And EV batteries, once exhausted, create immense recycling headaches with the current state of technology. My guess is that this will improve soon, but we aren't there yet.

Nonetheless, EVs are less expensive to operate than conventional fuel vehicles. The one item of regular maintenance on our Mach-E is refilling the windshield washer fluid. It was more expensive than most traditional cars like it, but the amount of money we'll save in maintenance and energy costs per month will make up a big part of the purchase price.

So for us, and our particular need, an EV makes a lot of sense. But this might not, in fact probably will not, apply to most. High-quality EVs are more expensive than average to purchase (I would not even consider, for many reasons, buying a cheap one) and charging them isn't as dead simple as filling a car with gasoline. The batteries come with some issues. EVs require a fair amount of material that comes from sketchy places. I anticipate that federal efforts to build a charging infrastructure are likely to end up as knackered as most other things that the federal government gets involved in that it really ought to stay out of.

If current events can provide any sort of teachable moment with regard to energy policy, it's that we need a good one. The Green New Deal isn't as much of a rational energy policy as it is an ideologically driven progressive gift register that ignores most of reality to concentrate on a narrow slice of it. Energy security is an important part of both a robust economy and overall national security — something that you ignore at your considerable peril.

We'll eventually get to greener energy (if you count nuclear), but it's not going to happen overnight — the economic costs are simply too high. In the meantime I suspect that we are going to have to resort to climate engineering to combat atmospheric warming. There happen to be some interesting and practical solutions that are not too far around the corner. I think that we are going to be OK.

But for now, I have to go. We are getting ready to find out which Mustang in the driveway is faster.

Associated Press and Idaho Club award-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding mountain bikes and motorcycles and playing guitars. His writing on Substack, “Howlin’ at the Moon in ii-V-I,” may be found at martinhackworth.substack.com.