Carbon taxes are easy. You tax anyone who pulls it out of the ground or imports it. With international agreements you might drop the import tax and let to source country tax the extraction. The producers will just pass the added cost on to the users. Even this simple solution will be shot down by politics.

Not the OP, but the best approach to climate change to me seems to make it so it's more expensive to produce energy that damages the climate. The government's role in this would be to take steps to encourage these kinds of developments. This certainly seems within our grasp, if we had the willpower to disband the top-down approaches being advocated and ones that will never work because it's asking the developing world to ... stop developing. If they don't stop emitting we're all doomed.

In contrast, if one or more countries develop a cheaper, clean technology that can be exported globally (perhaps at a cost) all countries would be incentivized to switch to it to save costs, and emissions start to plummet.

We need a full court press on getting to next-generation energy sources that stand to be 10x cheaper than existing ones. I'm not sure if you can get there with solar and other renewables alone, but from first principles (ie physics) it sure seems tractable to get there with some combination of nuclear technology and those sources.

Governments passing bills like this so people want to increase pivogian taxes:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend#Unit...

Governments love taxing stuff, and carbon taxes give them an excuse to raise taxes for something that seems like a “good reason”.

But of course they wouldn’t put one in without excluding everyone powerful enough to make a fuss about it.