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New Jersey Is the Latest State to Go All-EV

Gov. Phil Murphy announces new rules aiming to wean the state off internal combustion passenger vehicle sales by 2035.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy just announced a rule requiring that all new cars sold in the state must be electric by 2035, with interim goals starting for model year 2027 and ramping up from there.

Meeting these goals will take an aggressive push given that as of June, just 1.8% of the state’s light duty vehicles were electric, according to the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. To help with the transition, New Jersey offers rebates — up to $4,000 — on top of federal tax credits towards EV purchases. And though the Garden State has just 911 public charging locations as of February, compared to California’s 16,000, it plans to add 500 more by 2025.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state’s EV advocates greeted Murphy’s announcement with optimism. “Our state needs to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, and after this announcement we are no longer sitting in the slow lane while other states pass us by on clean energy,” Alex Ambrose, a climate policy analyst for New Jersey Policy Perspective, told local news outlet NJ Advance Media.

The new rule is based on a 2022 California regulation known as Advanced Clean Cars II, making New Jersey one of 17 states, including New York and Maryland, to adopt all or part of California’s low- or zero-emission vehicle regulations. Crucially, as Kate Klinger of the Governor’s Office of Climate Action and the Green Economy told ROI-NJ, Advanced Clean Cars II does not affect the sale of used cars. So just as a federal assault weapons ban wouldn’t mean AR-15s suddenly disappear, so too do EV sales targets allow for the continued existence of internal combustion vehicles.

Will that make 2035 the beginning of a new environmental culture war — new-car liberals versus used-car conservatives? We can only hope. As a native New Jerseyan, I’ll look forward to the day when our most vigorous debate is no longer whether the state’s favorite breakfast meat should be called “Taylor ham” or “pork roll.”

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Sparks

Major Renewables Nonprofit Cuts a Third of Staff After Trump Slashes Funding

The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.

The DOE wrecking ball.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.

IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)

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Sparks

Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

Donald Trump, Doug Burgum, and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.

Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.

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Sparks

Trump Just Suffered His First Loss on Offshore Wind

A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.

Donald Trump and wind turbines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.

The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”

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