Claiming some kind of taxation or subsidy to solve this problem will not work. So long as people can vote the people will vote away a tax they view as unfair, excessive, or otherwise not in their interest. Same goes for subsidies, although far worse. We can subsidize house insulation upgrades, electric cars, energy efficient bulbs, solar panels, or whatever else we tried. All this does is make the poor poorer (they are paying the taxes to support this subsidy in some fashion, though not always directly) and the rich richer (to collect the subsidy one has to have money to spend on the subsidized item).
The only way to fix this is to make CO2 expensive naturally. Raising the cost artificially, with taxes, can go as quickly as it came. How do we raise the cost of CO2 naturally? Well, for one it is going to rise as we keep using it up. The price goes down naturally with increased technology and economy of scale. Same applies for low CO2 energy, we need to fix this with technology and economy of scale.
We already have an artificially high cost of a low CO2 energy source, nuclear power. Make the process of getting a license to build a clear and straightforward process would help a lot. There's plenty of people that have applied with what I assume are reasonable applications, just issue the damned license already. We've been building very safe nuclear power plants in the USA for a long time, I think we have it figured out. Allow economy of scale to take place. If one reactor is approved then every one after it should only need approval for updates and site specific differences.
Wind and solar have already enjoyed economy of scale cost savings, I have difficulty believing we can improve much here. This will need technology improvements and after 50 years of trying real hard on this there's not likely to be much left to gain.
Once we stop digging deeper with nuclear we can learn to fill this hole by carbon sequestration. This was mentioned in the article but claimed it can only be done at great expense. A professor in Idaho (I forget his name) claims we might be able to mine a common rock called basalt and use that as fertilizer. It's rich in lime which farmers already spread on their fields to control acidity from spreading manure and such. This is an ongoing process so they have to keep applying more. Right now they mine limestone for this, which is "cooked" into the lime they need and this process produces a lot of CO2.
Basalt is a much harder rock than limestone, and it produces only half the lime content per mass. To make this a viable alternative to limestone we need energy that is too valuable to use to turn limestone into lime. This has an inherent contradiction since it's cheap energy that makes cooking limestone worthwhile. The solution, as I understand it, is to make energy cheap enough that it's easier to simply mine and move the readily usable (but more massive) basalt than mine, cook, and move the "lighter and softer" limestone.
This professor believes the only way to do this is with an energy source as cheap, reliable, and plentiful as nuclear power. Solar and wind will not do since the mines for basalt will have to run full speed, day and night, in all weather, to compete with limestone.
