This won't be popular with the HN crowd, but taxing activities that we want to reduce/minimize doesn't work. Cigarette taxes didn't work in any meaningful way (see https://www.nber.org/papers/w18326.pdf)
Electricity and power generated from carbon emitting sources on the other hand have a much more elastic demand curve. E.g. if your energy bill is cheaper with renewables, no one would choose to go with fossil fuels. Likewise with electric vehicles. If the cost of tanking up an EV is significantly lower than an internal combustion vehicle, people will switch for purely economic reasons.
You can look at the lack of a carbon tax as an incentive on fossil fuels which socializes the externalities.
Luckily most carbon intensive activities have alternatives.
> To summarize, our analysis of the association between cigarette taxes and adult cigarette use suggests that adult smoking is largely unaffected by taxes. At best, cigarette tax increases may have a small negative association with cigarette consumption, although it is difficult to distinguish the effect from zero, and in practical terms implies that it will take very large tax increases, for example, on the order of 100%, to reduce smoking by 5%. This finding raises questions about claims that, at the current time, tax (price) increases on cigarettes will have an important beneficial health impact through reduced smoking. It may be that in a time (2010) when the median federal and state cigarette tax is approximately $2.40 per pack, further increases in cigarette taxes will have little effect because the pool of smokers is becoming increasingly concentrated with those with strong preferences for smoking. Alternatively, as cigarette taxes and prices continue to rise, smokers are taking other steps to thwart the impact of the price increase such as switching brands and increasing purchases on the black market. Notably, we rule out border crossing as an important explanation of the small tax elasticities.
The pool of carbon emitters is not concentrated with those with strong preferences for emitting carbon. Cigarette taxes were already high at the time of the study. Anyone serious about carbon tax to counter global warming says that the tax needs to be very high.
If we get to the point that most people are carbon neutral, carbon taxes are high, and would need to be far higher for a 5% reduction in emissions from people with strong preferences for carbon emitting activities, great!
"The weight of evidence is that the excise tax increases continue to be the single most effective tool for reducing tobacco consumption and prevalence"
https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/pages/eval...