A global carbon tax in 1990 would have avoided a lot of the mess we find ourselves in. As it is we don't have the luxury of implementing one. Even something as

A global carbon tax in 1990 would have avoided a lot of the mess we find ourselves in. As it is we don't have the luxury of implementing one. Even something as weak as the Paris agreement hinges on one election in the US. A globally enforceable carbon tax is much much less feasible than universal cheap fusion power. That said, we are in the middle of the experiment you are talking about. Renewables are cheaper now than new nuclear, despite nuclear having received a massively larger amount of subsidies over the years, there are still many parts of the world that are building nuclear so it's not like we're losing the technology, but really, there doesn't currently seem to be a good reason for building new nuclear. Let me put it another way, a relatively small island like Ireland is going to be capable of going 100% wind/solar relatively soon. They are not strongly connected to the EU grid. Smaller disconnected islands already have gone 100% renewable. So we will have plenty [1] of test cases of increasing size as we ramp up renewables. Conveniently, electricity is also much more expensive on small islands, so it's also economical to test every technology you want to bring to maturity there first. If we find that beyond a certain size it doesn't work we'll have a decade of warning before we hit that wall with the big continental size grids. [1] 2200 EU Islands: https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/energy-strategy-and-energy-union/clean-energy-eu-islands https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/energy-strategy-and-en...