New Jersey has head start on cleaner air

PACKET EDITORIAL, July 24

   When Gov. Jon Corzine signed an executive order committing the state to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by the year 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, a lot of residents doubtless greeted the news with their best New Jersey "yeah, right" — then hopped into their SUVs and headed to the mall.
   Well, it turns out that all those SUVs, and all those malls dotting our sprawling suburbs, haven’t turned the Garden State into the great greenhouse gas emitter that one might think. Despite New Jersey’s heavy dependence on the automobile — and despite the state’s history as a dumping ground for toxic substances and reputation as a haven for heavy industrial polluters — our record on greenhouse gases, though far from enviable, isn’t so bad.
   Based on 2003 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, New Jersey ranks 16th in the country in total emissions of carbon dioxide, which most scientists agree is the biggest contributor to global warming. That’s not bad for a state with the 10th largest population. In fact, on a per-capita basis, the state ranks a distant 40th in this category.
   New Jersey ranks even lower — 47th — in per-capita emissions from electric power generation, which is responsible for nearly 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions nationwide. The reason? While other states rely heavily on coal, a cheap but dirty source of power, New Jersey gets about 50 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, and imports much of the rest from other states, like Pennsylvania, that tend to use coal or other fossil fuels.
   (This, of course, leaves New Jersey with a host of other problems — how, for example, to dispose of spent fuel rods and other radioactive waste, not to mention how to protect nuclear power plants from terrorist attacks — but none of these involve greenhouse gas emissions or happen to contribute to global warming.)
   The one area where one would expect New Jersey to rank particularly high in greenhouse gas emissions is transportation. New Jersey has some of the longest commute times in the country; it is also a major corridor for trucks moving through the heavily populated Northeast. Yet even in this category, although transportation accounts for about half the state’s carbon dioxide emissions, New Jersey ranks a respectable 18th.
   Surprisingly, where the state does score high — ninth in the nation — is in energy consumed in the home. Part of this may be attributable to our climate; we need to heat our homes in winter more than states to our south, and cool them in the summer more than states to our north. And part of it may have to do with New Jersey’s relative wealth; our homes tend to be bigger (so do our cars) and we seem to have no difficulty filling our multi-car garages.
   So there appears to be a good news-bad news story here. The good news is that as New Jersey embarks on a course of dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 2050, the task may not be quite as Herculean as one might think. The bad news is that the state’s carbon dioxide emissions have been growing at less than half the national average in recent years — 8.57 percent from 1990 to 2003, compared to 16.67 percent nationally — and the opportunities to cut the rate of increase even more may be quite limited. After all, it isn’t as though we can stop burning coal — we don’t burn much to begin with. And some of the strategies that would have a really meaningful impact — smaller houses, smaller cars, shorter commutes — would involve lifestyle changes that New Jerseyans may not be so quick to embrace.