Bring on the $1000 carbon price

Once you understand why, you might prefer $10,000

Whatever your goal is, it helps to have the right tools. To dig a trench, a spade is better than a spoon, but a backhoe is better than both. Most complex goals require more than one tool. A carpenter needs a saw, but won’t get far without also having a hammer, drill and so on. Tools are a lot less useful without knowing how best to use them, but the knowledge of how to use the tool does you little good if you can’t lay your hands on one.

So let’s imagine that the thing you want to do is really big, and really complicated, and really, really important. To get the job done, you want as many good tools available as possible, and it helps a lot to identify which tools are the most effective for accomplishing your task. We can’t avoid the worst that climate change has to offer without using every tool at our disposal. We need people to make good individual choices, and to offer them constructive options to choose from, but individual actions alone cannot get the job done. Just 100 corporations have been responsible for 71% of all greenhouse gas emissions. It’s obvious that collectively addressing the problem requires good policy.

Conveniently, as with Covid, there are experts with relevant experience that can tell us what measures are likely to be most…