Similarly to carbon taxes making nuclear power be more attractive hence making it happen, carbon taxes also make public transportation more attractive hence make it happen. To the objection Euro countries have "cultural differences" vs USA, carbon taxes create such cultural differences. These things are not just total coincidences. What appears to be a total revelation to ES (?) is that, long term, economic incentives cause large differences. Now one can back that up using actual data, showing large differences Euro-vs-USA even though Euro-vs-USA economies and pop.densities are similar (and I did) -- whereupon I was promptly scolded since maybe Euro cultural differences, or more public transport, or... here's another little dataset: Nuclear Fraction of Electricity by Country (billion kW hours per year nuc/total): France=404.9/461=87.8% GasPrice=8.13 Sweden=61.5/132.1=46.5% GasPrice=8.10 S.Korea=143.5/455=31.5% GasPrice=6.44 Japan=about 30% GasPrice=5.90 USA=769.3/3886=19.8% GasPrice=3.66* UK=64.0/344.7=18.5% GasPrice=7.75* Canada=91.0/549.5=16.6% GasPrice=4.67 Russia=165.6/1016=16.3% GasPrice=3.39* Germany=94.1/607=15.5% GasPrice=8.01* China=98.2/4693=2.1% GasPrice=4.67 Note the ordering of these countries by nuclear electricity fraction is the opposite of ordering by gasoline price (Bloomberg News http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/gas-prices) with 4 exceptions starred. Well, actually, the obvious conclusion from this 10-country dataset is not statistically significant, but if you just used the first 5 (which I think are the 5 greatest-nuclear-fraction countries) it would have seemed so at the 99% level. My claim: those "culture," "nuclear,", "public transport" differences are not proving I'm wrong, they are proving I'm right. [But anyway, public rail transport often is not more efficient per passenger mile than cars, contrary to propaganda. Probably inherently it can be, but in fact it is not, I think mainly because those engineering rail cars have tended to build them heavy while those engineering road cars have tried to lighten them with modern materials; and/or not enough filling fraction by passengers.]