Here in Canada, the Liberal party recently ran on the platform of a carbon tax ("The Green Shift"). They lost badly. People just heard "tax."

It's not entirely a clear data point, because they also had a leader perceived as weak. But the carbon tax was a big part of why he was perceived as weak.

I wonder if they tried to market it as a 'Fossil Fuel Tax' ... and then sold it to voters as a tax on Big-Bad Oil Companies ... if it'd garner more support.

People seem pretty convinced that oil companies are the root of all evil, so they might actually embrace the word 'tax' in this case.

(Of course, the oil companies and utilities could just point out that it would raise the price of gas, which would kill it. You could propose a law that gave everyone free ice cream for life and people would impose it if it raised their gas prices by a penny.)

That wouldn't work in Canada, because of the oil sands boom. Basically vast amounts of oil that weren't viable below $40 a barrel suddenly created billionaires overnight. And took our dollar from $0.75 to $1.05 (though now in retreat).

Yep. The problem with carbon tax is to get it implemented widely enough, so that you just don't displace the pollution to somewhere else. We have something similar today. In China it is nearly free to pollute, to have jobs with shitty work conditions. You could probably not run a factory in a country where the high tech goods (like iPhones) are being bought, the way you can in China. Because we don't have similar requirements for pollution, work environment etc. we have essentially pushed all the "unacceptable" behaviour to somewhere where it isn't "taxed" the same where as we would have. Maybe we just have to do it anyway, but it is going to be a problem.

Crypto-protectionists would have a field day. Since China hasn't adopted the carbon tax, we have to impose high import duties on all their goods...

Exactly. I commented in the other reply before reading this. You said it better than I did.

Even there you will run into issues.