As it is, the govt is spending a significant amount in studying and implementing green technologies, without it being funded by a carbon tax.
So, if a carbon tax were implemented, without changing any spending, it would be going towards green technologies, at least until the amount of it exceeded the expenditures.
And I certainly don’t disagree that we should be spending more to develop green technologies, and in that, I do include nuclear.
I concur, and I’ve heard interesting things lately about investments into geothermal power.
Without earmarking, it also offsets government spending on the results of global warming, like flooding and more dangerous hurricanes.
The gotcha is that $ is, or can be interpretted as, a formatting code. Just like enclosing something in asterisks makes it italic instead of showing the asterisks. But $ only works that way sometimes for obscure reasons.
The fix is to look at how the post appears in preview, and add a \ (backslash) immediately in front of the $ if you aren’t getting the look you want. The backslash is the “escape” command that says to ignore any magic for the immediately following $ and just display a $ character instead.
Interestingly, as I was composing & editing this post with 5 dollar signs, which one(s) didn’t appear kept changing. Eventually I backslashed all but the last to get the right look.
10 on a pack of smokes, .5 each.
Or
$10 on a pack of smokes, $.5 each
These look exactly the same in my post preview…
Just use the unicode version:
5! Looks like more money that way.
Show off 
Huh, now that’s really weird. When I posted it, I got a nice big green dollar sign. But now, it looks like a sorta stylized dollar sign without the line going fully through. Still looks different, but I don’t get what changed.
Nuclear power is crucial. A number of the most prominent climate scientists have been advocating for nuclear power as an essential part of the solution to the climate crisis.
As for geothermal, it’s not clear that it has widespread application, but it also means a variety of entirely different things in different contexts. It could mean the generation of electric power from geothermal energy. It might just mean heating one or more homes or buildings from a geothermal heat source. Or it might mean none of those things, but simply refer to the efficient operation of a heat pump for both heating and cooling in temperate zones by using heat exchangers well below the frost line, where the temperature is fairly constant in all seasons. All of those are worthwhile advances, but it’s not clear that any of them are going to be scalable enough to be game changers.
I don’t think nuclear is a good long-term option for energy, except for fusion. I think splitting atoms for energy has too many long-term waste-disposal problems.
Why do you think that? Please be specific. The problem with Chernobyl wasn’t anything inherent in nuclear power. The problem was the long Soviet practice of giving positions of power to people who were loyal communist instead of people who were competent.
Because splitting atoms for energy use creates long-lasting waste problems, like how to dispose of spent rods. Yes no CO2 emissions, but there could be significant long-term effects.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-and-the-environment.php
The entirety of all spent nuclear waste generated in the US since we began nuclear power would barely fill up a football field.
Also, new generations of nuclear plants not only can produce far less waste, they can actually eat the waste we already have.
Spent nuclear fuel is not really a problem that should stop the development and deployment of nuclear power.
I agree, especially the development of nuclear-fusion power.
Fusion power has been 20 years away my whole life. The waste issue with fission is a concern, but much less then the waste from coal.
Difference is, is that there are clear roadmaps to rolling out fission plants, absent excessive regulation or NIMBY pushback (I know, not likely) we could start having them come online in 5 years. Investing in modular reactors could start a massive rollout that could replace all our fossil fuels within a couple decades.
We don’t even know if fusion will be a viable energy source within the next few decades.
Not that we shouldn’t pursue it, be we can’t wait for it.