Preferred, but you often need more nuance than that — for example, if a carbon tax is set high enough to deter profitable heavy industrial activities it would require care not to have a disproportionate impact on people who depend on cars, non-electric heating, etc. Those can be mitigated, of course, but it starts to make the tax policy a lot more complicated.

The other problem is that we probably had time for a carbon tax when the idea was first advanced decades ago. It's not clear to me that we can afford a gradual approach now when we really need to be doing things like saying you just can't buy new coal burning equipment at any price, for example.

Carbon taxes are set up so they cancel regular taxes. So if you use the average amount of greenhouse gasses, you come out equal, if you use more than the average, you come out worse, and if you use less than the average you come out better. So overnight not a whole lot changes but everyone enters a race to use the least greenhouse gasses.

The problem is that people are starting from wildly variable positions. An old person on a fixed income can’t afford to replace their heating, add insulation, etc. quickly unless we have programs to help them; a rich guy who thinks gas is better for cooking or heating up his outdoor dining will blow off the minor increase; etc.

The problem is that we wasted 3+ decades on denialism and a lot of pollution comes from things with long service lives. A high-pollution SUV will be polluting in 2040, maybe 2050; a gas or oil heater might run into 2070. At this point we need more than gradual nudges — things like requiring special permits to buy new fossil fuel-burning equipment with heavy subsidies and 0% loans for installing electric alternatives.

Carbon taxes seem to be pretty unpopular and I think it’s a failure of imagination for climate economists to keep repeating the same idea instead of trying to find things that are more palatable.

Being against climate change and against carbon taxes at the same time basically boils down to "I want everyone else to work hard on solving this problem, except for me. I want to keep benefiting from the low prices that the pollution economy has made possible, but I don't want any pollution."

I don't think there's any reasonable solution that will appease those people.

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.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I'm pretty sure any solution that is drastic enough to actually work will be unpalatable. "Somebody else will pay for it" is the only solution anyone wants to hear.

Of course they're unpopular. No one wants to pay for the total lifecycle costs of what they do.

>trying to find things that are more palatable.

like what, wasting our effort banning flavor-of-the-day things like plastic straws or whatever?