(Above: The Oyster Creek nuclear plant, which will soon be closing, eliminating one of the state's primary sources of carbon-free electricity.)

There are sane environmentalists. And then there are environmentalists who have lost all touch with reality.

I'd put my brother who lives in California in the sane category. He just sent me a nice photo of a golden eagle framed by the Golden Gate. He drove there in his new Chevy Bolt, an all-electric car.

As for the crazy ones, the Statehouse was packed with them last week.

At a rally on the Statehouse steps the sponsors of a bill to end all fossil-fuel use by 2035 stood behind a banner that read: "New Jersey - 100 percent renewables now."

Now? That's impossible. At the moment the state gets a mere 3 percent of its electricity from renewables. The banner was an overstatement.

The actual bill isn't much more realistic, however. It calls for the state to get all its electricity from renewables by a mere 17 years from now.

That's a fantasy for a few reasons. One is that 39 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power. Even though nukes are carbon-free, they're not considered "renewable" under the bill's definition.

Another reason is that New Jersey is part of the PJM grid, a transmission network that began with Pennsylvania, Jersey and Maryland - hence the initials - but now links 13 states and the District of Columbia. We can't stop electrons at the state line and ask them how they were generated.

But the biggest reason is cost. Last week Gov. Phil Murphy signed an executive order stating that New Jersey will rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a 10-state cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions. Gov. Chris Christie had pulled the state out of RGGI, as it's known.

On Monday, Moody's Investor's Service put out a release stating that the state's participation in RGGI, as it's known, "will cause power prices in the state to increase as generators include the cost of carbon emissions in their pricing."

New Jersey already ranks among the top third of states when it comes to electricity prices. Participation in RGGI will raise those rates further.

But the news is not all bad for consumers, the report stated. Because nuclear energy provides so much of our power, biggest nuke operator, PSEG, will benefit from the higher prices but will not be hit by the higher fees. If we didn't have those nuke plants, we'd really get socked in our monthly bills.

This is the point at which the sane people split with the insane ones.

Senate President Steve Sweeney is among the sane ones. He wants to keep the PSEG nuke plants in Salem County operating indefinitely. To that end, he is backing a bill that would grant the operators state subsidies for producing carbon-free power similar to the subsidies for renewables such as solar.

Sweeney has also supported over the objections of some environmental advocates the conversion of a coal-fired generating facility in Cape May County to cleaner-burning natural gas.

He supports both solar and wind subsidies, but argues that both are intermittent and therefore require conventional generation as a back-up.

"I'm all about capturing the offshore wind business," Sweeney said. "But the realities are that if don't have gas then we can't afford the renewables."

This sort of common sense enrages the not-so-sane crowd, who flooded the Statehouse wearing matching T-shirts calling for a 100 percent switch to "Class I Renewable Energy Sources" by 2035.

That category also excludes natural gas. Fracking is a prime target of the not-so-sane crowd. But more than half of our electricity generation comes from gas. Never mind how to replace it, we'd also have to phase it out by 2035 under the bill.

That deadline can't possibly be met, Sweeney said. He noted that he has sponsored bills for wind and solar subsidies, but the transition will take time. And it's unrealistic to oppose nuclear power if your goal is cutting carbon emissions, he said.

"Nuclear has a role to play because it has zero carbon footprint," he said.

High electricity rates are the No. 2 reason after high taxes that business owners say they are reluctant to locate in New Jersey, he said.

"There's a balance to get where you want to go. If we try it without striking that balance, we're going to drive up energy rates so we drive all the business out of the state," he said."It's easy to say we want to be zero emissions on Day One, but who's going to pay for that?"

Not me - at least not if the sane people prevail in Trenton.

ADD: The people who argue that we should be fossil-fuel-free by 2035 apparently don't have access to calendars.

Here's a good example from my own life that shows how impractical that is. I have a 2000 Mazda sports car that I use primarily when the weather is nice. It only has 65,000 miles on it and is still in great shape. I plan to drive it for years to come.

But it's 18 years old. Now imagine you had just bought a new one, as my sailing buddy the Captain did recently. By the time it has 18 years on the clock, we'd be into 2036. How would you gas it up without fossil fuels?

That's just one example of how unrealistic these demands are.

ALSO: I believe the threat of carbon emissions is vastly overstated, as does the smartest guy in New Jersey - and the universe.

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