Before New Jersey can require all new car sales to be electric starting in 12 years, drivers, business owners and climate groups will have ample opportunity to have their say on the regulations.
On Thursday, mostly the last of those — specifically advocates in support of green energy alternatives — filed into the first public hearing on the matter since Gov. Phil Murphy pushed forward the Advance Clean Cars II standards in July.
While not proposed as a law, thus at the will of a future administration, the rule’s adoption would put New Jersey on track with California and a handful of other states in reducing fossil fuel pollution from passenger cars and light-duty trucks which includes any vehicles under about 10,000 pounds.
“New Jersey traffic … harms our air quality and our health, especially in communities that are nearest to our major traffic corridors,” Leslie Bockol, of the independent political organization New Jersey Working Families Party, said during the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s virtual meeting Thursday morning.
“Those areas — environmentally overburdened communities — are too often home to working class and poor families….often communities of color, who bear the brunt of pollutions’ health impact,” she continued, “even as they have the least ability to relocate or access adequate health care.”
Other groups like the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club (both its New Jersey and national chapter), Clean Water Action, Environment New Jersey, Empower NJ and NJ Work Environment Council joined Bockol and a chorus of others in supporting the rule while pointing to its health and economic benefits.
The proposal is an administrative rule in line with Murphy’s clean energy goals, which include requiring all new car sales in New Jersey to be zero-emissions starting in 2035 but gradually ramping up between three and four years from now. That requirement allows for hybrid vehicles too.
A handful of organizations on Thursday — such as the Fuel Merchants Association of New Jersey and New Jersey Gasoline-Convenience-Automotive Association — said they opposed the standards, also called “ACCII,” while citing electric car affordability, the timeline of the state’s goals and charger access.
“New Jersey and all the other ACCII states will be 100% EV sales market(s) when consumers want to buy only EVs not when government mandates it,” said James Appleton, president of the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers, which advocates for the auto retail sector. “Frankly, we believe this plan will frustrate and cause a consumer backlash that will slow our road to an EV future, not accelerate it.”
The three-hour virtual gathering, attended by about 100 people, came nearly a month after the NJDEP filed the rule to the state register — triggering a public comment period. As the public still needs to weigh in on ACCII proposal for 60 days, it’s unclear when exactly the regulations will begin. It may depend on any adjustments made to the rule following feedback from residents.
The clock is ticking for New Jersey to install the rules if you ask climate activists who warn it should happen by the end of the year or else some of the benefits of the eco-friendly car options will be lost.
Those opposed to adopting the rule in 2023, namely the New Jersey Business & Industry Association and some Republican lawmakers, are wary the zero-emissions proposal could mean higher costs for drivers.
Former Assembly deputy speaker John Burzichelli said he took issue with the environmentally-friendly ambitions taking the form of a mandate.
“I can tell you that the tone of New Jersey residents when they hear the word ‘mandate,’ whether it be for the potential of gas stoves in their homes or how an automobile will be propelled, ‘mandate’ is a word that concerns them greatly,” said Burzichelli, a Democrat who is running for state Senate this November.
Other critics of the rule have also framed it as fast-moving and unrealistic.
But Murphy and his administration have repeated that ACCII will be installed as a flexible rule on a measured year-by-year basis, include a credit program to ease the shift for car manufacturers and allow for used gas vehicles to be sold going forward.
It’s electric! But how much does it cost?
Two topics brought up Thursday by those both opposed and in favor of electric vehicle requirements: the cost of clean cars and access to chargers.
Cox Automotive, which owns price advisor Kelley Blue Book, notes the average price for an electric car in July 2023 was $53,469 compared to $48,334 for gas-powered vehicles.
Supporters said electric and hybrid cars are bound to get cheaper over time as the market expands and the state plans to install plenty of additional chargers. However, several detractors of the rule disagreed and said they worry about what requiring eco-friendly vehicles will mean for drivers financially.
The cost question is not unique to New Jersey.
“I think this is true across the country,” Aniruddh Mohan, a distinguished postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, said the day before the virtual hearing.
Mohan noted federal and state incentives exist to make that price tag more palatable and the lifetime of electric and hybrid vehicles — plus lower costs tied to recharging compared to pumping in more gas — should make it more attractive to new car buyers.
The Princeton expert said wariness over charger availability was also common.
“Range anxiety is the feeling that electric vehicles cannot cover enough distance on a full charge compared to a gasoline vehicle with a full tank,” Mohan said, “and that driving an EV means you might run out of juice midway through your journey and be stranded.”
New Jersey expanding its charging infrastructure and zero-emission cars with larger ranges in the future should calm those worries, Mohan said.
And making those investments plus changing our ways as a state will be critical, said Alex Ambrose, a climate policy analyst for nonpartisan think tank, New Jersey Policy Perspective.
Transportation emissions, Ambrose emphasized, have gone up nationwide since 2020 and contribute the largest of any sector in the Garden State. In 2020, pollution from this sector alone made up about 37% of greenhouse gas emissions in New Jersey. Those emissions and climate change writ large have been shown to fuel wildfires and hurricanes.
“This year, I’ve seen more hospital admissions for potentially climate change-related issues than in any other of the seven years I’ve been in practice,” said Catherine Chen, an academic hospitalist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, who noted she spoke Thursday as a private resident and physician.
She noted New Jersey’s highway density is about 4.7 times higher than the national average.
“(Our) homes, schools and workplaces are that much closer to highways and major thoroughfares, and their combustion byproducts … When we consider issues of health disparities, inequity of exposure to toxins is one of these causes.”
As of June 2023, there were more than 123,000 electric vehicles on the road — about 1.8% of the approximate 6.5 million total registered vehicles statewide, according to figures on a database provided by state officials. Murphy said in 2019 that New Jersey would aim to have 330,000 electric and hybrid vehicles registered in the state by 2025.
A draft of the NJDEP’s new climate action plan, released Tuesday as part of Climate Week, said to meet its clean energy goals the Garden State would need to have 4.5 million light-duty plug-in electric vehicles on the road in 2035, representing 73% of all registered light-duty vehicles.
Source : NJ