Carbon taxes appeal to economists because they are a direct incentive to stop doing the bad thing. But they are a bad policy because no one will implement them. In the past it seemed that dealing with climate change was going to require populations choosing to suffer economic loss to decarbonise the economy. But these days that seems less necessary. For example solar is cheaper than many dirty sources of power so just investing in ramping up solar power can help make it even cheaper and the economics then discourages dirty power because energy is too cheap for it to be profitable (and having cheap energy is not bad for the economy either). Subsidising hybrid[1] car purchases could be another helpful thing for emissions and doesn’t require people to feel like everything is getting more expensive.
I think the problem with carbon taxes is that they are a good solution to a negative sum game, but I think it turns out the actual game is positive sum and that carbon taxes are not an implementable solution.
[1] the big constraint with electric cars is batteries. Plug-in hybrid cars use electricity for short trips (ie most miles travelled) and so lead to more efficient use of the available batteries than electric cars that mostly use <20% of the battery capacity in a day leaving the rest unused.
