“You have to keep costs in mind, because we are in competition with New York, with Delaware, and surrounding states,” Mr. Egenton said.

Like other states that have taken on climate change in the absence of any action from the White House, New Jersey has set a goal of producing 100 percent clean energy by 2050. Many states, including New York and California, have tried to create a bulwark against the dismantling of federal rules to combat climate change, and have joined together to challenge President Trump’s rollbacks in court.

The Trump administration, however, has retaliated against efforts by states to impose regulations that supplement or skirt relaxed federal standards. The clearest example of this was the revocation of California’s ability to set state-level standards on climate-warming tailpipe emissions that were stricter than the federal government’s.

In New Jersey, Mr. Murphy’s land-use initiative is in part a recognition that in order to reach its goals for reducing greenhouse gases, the state needed to add a new level of oversight to the building process to complement incentives aimed at changing individual and corporate behavior.

“You need the carrot and the stick,” said Shawn LaTourette, chief of staff at the Department of Environmental Protection. “We’ve put out a lot of carrots — incentives. But the regulation needs to be the stick.”

It is hard to dispute the impact of climate change on New Jersey and its 130 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline.

A study released in November by Rutgers University found that the sea level in New Jersey was rising more than two times faster than the global average. Since 1911, the sea level rose 1.5 feet, compared with the global mean of 0.6 feet.