*F-250

Saw an F-450 the other day... granted, it was at the gun range, but I was there in my compact hatchback and it had not a spec of dust on it.

It doesn't simply "have a long history of political failure"; it has a history of political failure in certain areas of the United States. In much of the rest of the developed world, e.g. nearly all of Western-Europe, it has a history of success and taxing cars based on fuel consumption and emissions has indeed caused buyers to gravitate towards more fuel-efficient cars.

Do they tax the rate of emissions, or the amount emitted? It's important to tax the latter.

Both. The former directly through taxes on the cars themselves and the latter indirectly through fuel taxes, which while imperfect works well as a proxy.

Fuel taxes work well for CO2 emissions, but not for other emissions, where the design of the ICE can reduce them dramatically.

Fair point, but the EU ETS took many, many years to have any serious effect as I understand it.

If we can have a sales tax, we can have pollution taxes.

In the United States, you can't, at least at a federal level, nor across most of the red states.