New Jersey’s 80×50 Plan: What is it and how are we doing?

In 2020, New Jersey published a report detailing their ideal goals and programs to be implemented to decrease the net carbon emissions annually from 120 million metric tonnes (MMT) in 2006 to around 24 MMT by the year 2050. To many, such a decrease (of 80% of carbon emissions hence the term 80×50) seems incredibly optimistic, and such reactions are quite possibly justified. 

The report, which is about 200 pages long, focuses on every aspect of emissions in New Jersey, including transportation, commercial and industrial buildings, energy production, halogenated gasses, and waste management. Each individual aspect has targets that are desired to be reached by the year 2050, and some even have smaller milestones that would serve to evaluate current progress. 

That being said, certain milestones, particularly those in the transportation reduction section of the report, paint the picture that perhaps New Jersey is not as on-track to reduce our emissions as was once believed. This can be seen in the year-end goal to have 330,000 light electric vehicles present in New Jersey by the end of this year, 2025. As of January 2025, there are roughly 200,000 light electric vehicles, which is significantly off-target even given the remaining 11 months.

This isn’t to say that as a whole our carbon emissions are not decreasing at a good enough rate, as there are promising signs coming from some of the other sectors, namely energy production. This is the main reason why current carbon emission rates have dropped to roughly 97 MMT annually as of today. Since 2006, there have been numerous successful efforts to convert or replace existing coal/fossil-fuel powered energy plants with lesser-emitting natural gas powered ones. There are also nuclear plants although their widespread implementation is at a much earlier stage. 

Regardless of the mixed fortunes of our efforts to decrease carbon emissions statewide, there is still plenty more analysis that must be done both on the initial milestones’ feasibility and our current progress towards reaching them. Such analysis can be done in much the same way that these goals were set, which was through regression data analysis of annual trends and what said trends predicted for the future.