[jpfed]

As a programmer, I empathize with the impulse to go with the elegant, unified solution of carbon taxes.

The problem is that everybody gets hurt, in at least a short-term sense, by a carbon tax. And yes, a lot of people will understand that this is a necessary pain. But all the worst carbon offenders that might campaign against a climate policy would get hurt by the same thing at the same time, so they would provide a large lobbying voice to weaken or destroy what's hurting them (this example is about carbon taxes, but really any sort of universal punitive measure) as a policy.

Politically, punishments will remain effective for longer if they are targeted so that the opposition to them remains divided. It _might_ help if carbon taxes could be adopted on a per-industry basis, because polluters are nothing if not keen to avoid thinking about anything that they perceive as not their problem- it should be possible to avoid triggering any sort of sense of polluter-solidarity on their part.

Another possibility is offering positive financial incentives to stopping fossil fuel activity. The government could directly give cash to companies that stop pulling coal and oil out of the ground, or stop burning it. Fracking companies in particular should be given a ton of money if they convert to geothermal.

[derbOac]

Ecologically sustainable changes will happen when it's cheap and/or comfortable to do, period.

Increasing the costs of carbon-based choices will just lead to civil unrest. I think this is already part of where recent problems in the US are coming from.

Carbon taxes and similar solutions implicitly assume that the individual making the carbon-positive choice is the one who should bear the cost. I feel a bit like it's you have decades of individuals and groups insulating themselves from real costs, through deception and ignorance, and then us deciding to pass those costs onto those who can't or don't want it anyway. Socialized risk, capitalized gain all over again.

You might say that nature is going to extract those costs one way or another, but this is one case where I think the moral responsibility is in spreading those costs out in ways that can be borne realistically.

Better for the average person worldwide to make the sustainable choices cheaper rather than increase the costs of the unsustainable choices, because then that's implicitly just increasing costs for everything in many situations.