Full Notification

It was another good day in South Brunswick last Friday. I was happy & honored to be joining our town’s dear friends at Hermann Services and Campbell Frieghtliner as they discussed an exciting initiative - a serious undertaking toward converting tractor fleets toward electric power rather than fossil fueled.

Each of these companies - here in South Brunswick - will ultimately invest many millions of dollars toward this end. They are doing the work on building the infrastructure, training the workforce, and investing in the technology. It takes fortitude to do such things. Particularly when it is your own skin in the game.

In South Brunswick, local, county, and state governments have worked diligently with the private sector to foster an environment that removes barriers to progress.

In the recent past, South Brunswick has partnered with Republic Services to install 40,000 solar panels on the old municipal landfill. That one project now produces 14-megawatts of clean energy daily and reduces carbon emissions by the equivalent of 2,700 internal combustion motor vehicles every day. We’ve partnered with Dow Jones and very many distribution centers to install roof-top solar arrays that produce multiple dozens of megawatts of clean electricity every day without covering lawns and playing fields. The most recent project moved forward two weeks ago. We expect to foster more.

All this dovetails with our 2020 initiative to provide enough local clean energy or access to clean energy options in the marketplace to match the electricity needs of this town by 2030, consistent with Governor Phil Murphy’s 2019 comprehensive clean energy bill that challenges the entire state to achieve 50% renewable electricity by 2030.

We are well underway. It is well within our reach to meet these goals.

The effort, undertaken here with Hermann Services & Campbell Freightliner as the lead agencies, is something different and exciting. It seeks to address that same challenge by enhancing the nature of a great American talent: logistics.

We owe it to ourselves and future generations to be open-eyed about the seriousness of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions and make decisions based on facts.

Civilized societies are shaped by environments and tasks, shaped to necessary functions by the pressures of reality.

Successful civilized societies depend upon the cooperation & intelligence of their people, and their recognition of a shared purpose. Successful societies rely upon the coordination of government with the energies of the private sector.

The human world will always be in motion. This will continue. We will continue in this work, and we will achieve a world where the air is fresher & the world is better. And by doing what we know to be necessary, we will have fulfilled this part of our obligations to future generations.

The happy news on Friday and today and tomorrow: Progress is under way in South Brunswick, where our town’s motto is “The Crossroads of Progress.”

Thank you to Hermann Services and Campbell Freightliner for leading the way.