Carbon taxing is, in some suitably narrow economic point of view, optimal, but it seems it's politically almost impossible to get it passed.

The other popular large-scale technology-neutral suggestion, cap-and-trade, suffers from much of the same problems. E.g. the EU ETS is mostly a bureaucratic boondoggle that achieves nothing (the price is so low it doesn't have much, if any, effect).

So what then? Well, performance standards may not be as neutral as a carbon tax/cap-and-trade, but they seem politically much more palatable: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/16/180963...