Why stop at a CO2 tax? All kinds of problems could be solved with a dictatorship.
It does not require an authoritarian central leadership.
But it does require stopping and rolling back the capture of political bodies and the public sphere generally by private interests.
If gas, energy, or home heating prices double, whoever's in power is going to be voted out. It's not the capture of political bodies that drives that--it's normal people. It'll take a suspension of democracy or a long time to make a measurable impact on climate change.
(And since emissions are not distributed linearly, the losers from a cost-neutral carbon-tax with per-capita-dividend will always be a minority.)
From what I'm being told, fundamental changes need to occur in our consumption to have a measurable impact on climate change. That won't happen with normal people continuing to consume at the same rates they have.
Could a carbon tax be designed such that normal people are effectively reimbursed and heavy emitters pay more? Yes. But you're not going to measurably impact climate change without somehow incentivizing people to use less. At some point, people need to use less, and when you force them to (through taxes or restrictions), it won't be popular politically.
More clearly stated, my point is that what's really needed is people to adjust their consumption downward dramatically, but the taxes necessary to cause that will be politically infeasible.
And you don't think the difference in prices has anything to do with that?
Looking up the statistics on miles driven, the gap isn't as big as I expected, though, so I'm probably not giving the tax as much credit as it deserves.
You could double the price of gas in the US and driving would not change much, because people would have no other way to get to work and get their kids to school. The most you could hope for is that people would buy more efficient cars.