Even the EU has a lot of poorer member states. "Far higher energy prices" in Lithuania or Romania would be unbearable for the local population. Few people are ready to silently freeze to death in the name of climate protection.

I am sure this will work great and not lead to historic route at the next election. Notice how fast Biden got on trying to contain the gas prices?

You have to understand that massive slices of society whole lives depend on gas prices being in certain range. They are not going to go eat cake.. they WILL do something about it.

How so? And by Westerners do you mean NA + EU or NA?

What about Australia?

By a dramatic margin the most polluting nations in all respects are non-Western nations. Your tax premise is backwards accordingly.

Insert retort: yeah but that's just because the West outsources its pollution. No, in fact 'developing' countries like China are self-contained pollution monsters. In order to fulfill their own gigantic consumer demand, China has to be the world's most polluting nation with how they've structured their grid and industry. Exports to eg the US are a small share of China's emissions problem and getting ever smaller as a share of the problem.

China is about to become the world's largest economy and gets 60% of its energy from coal, while they aggressively build a lot more coal power plants and their emissions continue to skyrocket (despite already outputting more emissions than the US + EU combined). While US and EU emissions continue to contract (their consumer demand growth + economic growth is largely net stagnant anyway), China will again double its emissions output, guaranteeing the planet will be partially destroyed (if the climate predictions are at all accurate).