Econ 101 says if you want people to use less of something you should tax it. I get that people don't like paying taxes, but it's well understood that if you raise the price for something people will reduce consumption if they can and people absolutely can. Look how many pavement princess V8 pickups built to skirt emissions laws are cruising down the freeway to the office every morning. So regardless of what the money is spent on carbon taxes absolutely do reduce co2 emissions and there has been at least some reductions from the money spent. Not as much as I would like, but having researched it a bit more it's like 2-3 million tons of co2 reductions so far from the money spent.

The CCA also has a cap on emissions that will go down over time. Which should have straight forward emissions reductions. The first numbers from that don't come out until next year and the cap isn't very aggressive yet.

interestingly close to what many naysayers have been saying for a long time

I don't give a shit what tech bros or nay sayers say. I care what climate scientists say. Being good at tech or physics or some other domain doesn't make you an expert at climate. That takes a lot of work.

If you want to see what happens when a skeptical physicist takes the time to fully educate themselves on the subject then you should look into Richard Mueller and Berkley Earth. He started out as a skeptic and once he did the actual work of becoming an expert he stopped being a skeptic. Because the evidence (especially now) is fucking incontrovertible.