> the sanctimonious environmentalists will fight it because it minimizes the need for heroic personal sacrifice with respect to preserving the environment

Any evidence for this? IMO "Sanctimonious environmentalists" only care that consumption reduces. Whether that's voluntary or due to being priced out by carbon taxes is irrelevant. If anything doing it voluntarily, before it was ever needed to make your household budget work, would make them feel even holier.

> Any evidence for this? IMO "Sanctimonious environmentalists" only care that consumption reduces. Whether that's voluntary or due to being priced out by carbon taxes is irrelevant.

The New York Times said that their article pointing out that (most) recycling has higher environmental costs than landfill attracted the most complaints of any article for at least 10 years.

My old professor doesn't get invited to climate conferences anymore because he ran some serious research into whether geoengineering approaches were feasible.

There is definitely a large constituency of hair-shirt environmentalism that cares more about how much you're suffering for the sacrifices you're making than about how big an actual effect you're having.

It's pretty much a tautology--I'm defining "sanctimonious environmentalist" as one who makes showy personal sacrifices for esteem. If emissions decrease because manufacturing processes become more efficient, then their sacrifices were for naught and the lifestyle they've been pushing on others becomes irrelevant (or decreases in relevance).

> then their sacrifices were for naught and the lifestyle they've been pushing on others becomes irrelevant

And I'm arguing the opposite. In the short-term at least, costs will rise and people will be forced to cut back.

I agree that's the short-term effect (although a carbon tax will likely start out small and increase over time so as to minimize unpopular effects), but in my experience this analysis is too sophisticated for most of this "sanctimonious environmentalist" group. I.e., people who tend to believe that the environment hinges on converting people to vegan cyclists are not likely to understand economics well enough to understand a carbon tax. This is a big and unflattering generalization for expedience sake, so I'm trusting readers to understand the larger point and not get mired in "this is a generalization!" counterarguments.

Environmentalists would absolutely not fight it. They've been begging for a carbon tax for 40 years.

I was specifically referring to the subset of environmentalists who believe that salvation lies in converting everyone to veganism and cycling. But there are a lot of people who style themselves as environmentalists who oppose carbon taxes:

* The "personal responsibility" environmentalists described above

* The "anti-market" environmentalists who assume without evidence that markets necessarily make things worse

* The Green New Deal environmentalists who largely want to use the threat of climate change as political cover for social spending ("climate justice").

The last bullet might be too broad--there might be some GND environmentalists who are sincere, but certainly the overwhelming majority of GND policy and rhetoric seem to be more concerned with social spending than decarbonizing the atmosphere. I think there's a lot of overlap between this group and the prior two groups as well.

> it minimizes the need for heroic personal sacrifice with respect to preserving the environment

The dirty secret is that plenty of technology exists that can actually increase your quality of life while lowering your energy consumption. I'm not just talking about EVs, but electric buses and trains, heat pumps, sealing up drafty houses. But these things require changing how we do things, not necessarily how much we consume of things.