The initiative wasn't so simple. In addition to the carbon tax, it included a reduction in the state sales tax, with the net result being an overall reduction in tax revenue for the state. With social services and education already underfunded (at least in people's minds), this was a difficult tradeoff to make.

My sense was that the initiative was formulated to appeal to two different groups of voters but in doing so ended up alienating both.

As I understand it, the carbon tax proposal in Washington was supposed to be revenue-neutral. Do you have a pointer showing it would come out revenue-negative?

It was designed to be revenue neutral, but it's a bit hard to predict behavior changes which will affect the result (and the whole point was to change behavior).

This. A carbon tax avoids creating a million regulations for every place where we could save energy, because companies who spend too much carbon will just have fewer money to keep going, and you'd just have to compare the price of things to know which ones are less ecologic. Besides, the tax can be used for ecologic projects, or can be used to reduce other taxes.

But every time I try to explain it in France, I'm answered "But you don't realize! Poor people won't be able to afford a car or meat and they'll be the first ones to go bankrupt!". Which is why I say: Fusionning socialism and ecology in France, where all ecologist groups are leftish, badly hurts their work. A right-wing ecology who isn't adverse to capitalism would come up with a CO2 tax with success and actually do something against global warming.

> Poor people won't be able to afford a car or meat and they'll be the first ones to go bankrupt

A good solution to that would be to payout all of the proceeds of the carbon tax split evenly between everyone. That way people with below average carbon emissions will actually end up with more money than they had before, though they would still be incentivized to emit less.

The idea was to couple it with a sales tax reduction, and sales tax is usually characterized as regressive (disproportionately affecting the poor).

I found http://www.vox.com/2016/10/18/13012394/i-732-carbon-tax-wash... very helpful in understanding some of what was going on with this ballot initiative, and in particular why the environmentalist establishment opposed it. That opposition explains some of the strange outcome.