It's politically easier to create import duties or to go into debt and subsidize things. The level of taxation we need to stop a complete catastrophe is higher than people will put up with in most of the world.
Sure, you can try to be sneaky about it, implementing policies that only indirectly impact fossil fuels and hoping the voters don't notice you're the one to blame for the rising price of energy. Or you can be honest, bite the bullet, and try to convince the public a carbon tax is necessary to avoid something even worse down the line. Either way you're fighting an uphill battle.
Prostitution is legal, abortion is legal, and they have pilot trials for "cannabis clubs"
And then you look at the actual rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_initiative_(Switzerlan...): "A double majority of people and cantons is required to change the constitution."
--> Swiss cantons are split up historically, not by population, similar to US states. The conservative, low-pop cantons can hold the progressives hostage on anything they don't like because even if you get the liberal cities behind you that is still way beyond the majority of cantons.
But most times the tax is proposed, special interests on the left insist the revenue must be spent on <pet cause> & sink the whole effort.
You can have a very small town of 100 people that is designed so people can get around without a car. Small towns in Ireland, for example, look very different from small towns in the US -- but we used to build like that, and we can again. If you live out in the sticks, you probably make a lot of unnecessary trips because fuel is cheap, where there is potential to wait and do lots of shopping at once. You can probably insulate your house better, buy an electric water heater, stick solar panels on your house, etc.
Farms depend on a lot of machinery that uses fossil fuels right now, which is difficult to change, but could gradually be converted to more efficient energy sources. And actually, the Energy Innovation Act, which is Citizens' Climate Lobby's preferred carbon tax, has an exemption for agriculture -- it's a very small part of emissions, and it's worth it to get more people on board with the bill and get it passed sooner rather than later.
And we shouldn't compare an imperfect but still good tax to some unachievable ideal, we should compare it to other real-world solutions, and in that comparison, I think a carbon tax with dividend is probably the fairest and most cost-effective way to quickly cut carbon emissions.
1. tax flying, or rather shame airlines who do not compensate aggressively until they all do, and monitor compensation schemes because at the moment, too many are non-sensical blackmail-like counter-factual arguments around cutting forests;
2. ban industrial releases of CO2: all has to be captured and stored; storage is cheap now, so industrials will rather do that than lobby (until storage price go up, but at that points, things will have gotten much uglier);
3. ban new ICE cars, or make those excessively expensive to build: second-hand cars price will explode subsidising current car owners, and opening a wider gap for electric cars. Guarantee loans on electric cars to make them unaffordable cheaper, until the resell value takes over. No need to make gas more expensive: electric cars are cheaper to maintain today. You just have to make it more obvious to buyers.
The industry will R&D ways to cut pollution since they'll be financially incentivized to do that, the resulting technology will be later adapted for other applications.