The first step I think is making nuclear count as "green" for the the EU subsidies, and natural gas not.

Even if no one builds nukes with that plan, then at least all the green parties will be having more public internal battles over the issue.

See https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-str... for example for Macron staking his campaign on the nuclear subsidies.

The big risk here isn't just worse prices, but the grid failing entirely and people not being able to get electricity at any price. And even if it doesn't quite go that far, a whole bunch of businesses will fail and a large swathe of people will have to choose between heating and putting food on the table - and there's no clever tricks with subsidies or redistribution of cash that can avoid that, because the whole reason the prices are so high is because there's not enough energy for everyone.

Heating in the EU is mostly oil and gas. It needs electricity to run, but not enough that electricity prices are a major issue.

In the end the question is how fast the market reacts. Plant shut downs are predictable events years into the future, and in the event of an impeding black out energy prices on the spot market are going to be insane. That seems like a great incentive to build anything you can get past Nimbys fast enough. And the biggest industrial consumers shut down anyways as electricity prices rise (bad for the economy, great for the grid).

If we want to adequately prepare for the long term affects of climate change it seems like dykes, irrigation projects, improved farming methods, displacement preparation for affected third world areas, and solutions to mitigate effects regardless of source would be wiser. Freeman Dyson spoke about this. There’s by no means a guarantee that stopping anthropogenic climate change would stop the long term deleterious effects of natural climate change from still occurring.

Making the power grid less responsive and more weather dependent is making civilization less adaptive to climate change with no guarantees of stopping climate change, so treating a phase out of coal without adequate replacement like it’s beneficial in the long term doesn’t make sense to me. Reducing coal makes sense, but not at the expense of a less adaptive more weather dependent power grid. Nuclear salt reactors seem like the obvious choice for a replacement from all angles, including CO2, access to fuel, energy output, independence from weather, etc. The only reason why they’re not replacing coal and renewables seems to be regulation and PR. I think the R&D for a lot of them are already done, and they’re much cheaper to maintain and produce/believe a lot of modern designs are quite simple. Most of the expense seems to be from regulatory burden and old laws about different reactors.

We are building plenty of dykes. But every additional centimetre of sea level rise we cause is at least one more centimetre of dyke we have to maintain along all shores, indefinitely. And on top of that all the additional defences against intense rainfall in cities and along all major rivers. From a purely monetary standpoint it's hard to find an investment that pays greater dividends for a society over the decades and centuries than one that reduces climate change

That assumes we know definitively to what degree reducing anthropogenic climate change will reduce overall climate change, and that creating energy grids with more problems and less adaptability (which lessens our ability to create the kind of infrastructure we would inevitably need to protect vulnerable areas from natural climate change) and the downstream losses from that will prevent interventions that we might need to do anyway with less energy and wealth.

Nuclear seems like a great option because it avoids needing to resolve that cost benefit analysis. It reduces CO2 without causing energy grid problems. The newer reactors in particular seem like a pretty definitive win on all fronts. There are a bunch of promising sounding companies trying to get into that space and it sounds like the major roadblock for all of them is regulatory, not technicals or R&D expense at this point (seems like there are existing designs which have been prototyped/are ready to go, just can’t get built due to red tape; one US company moved to Indonesia out of frustration, design seems safe and low cost -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-500?wprov=sfti1)