Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Sparks

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.”

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis that

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

Keep reading...Show less
Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

Keep reading...Show less