Connecticut, USA wants to penalize insurers for backing fossil-fuel projects

Today, there are people afraid that, if they engage in climate activism, they will be evicted from their homes, denied medical treatment, and left to starve to death. Several governments are labelling people 'extremists' for blocking traffic with their (somehow) non-violent protests, and enforcing laws against them that were originally designed for terrorism.

> I don’t want an authority that is so feared that the people are afraid to speak out against it or cannot be changed.

To be clear: I agree with this. But this definition of "authoritarianism" isn't compatible with what you were originally complaining about. Every action is an imposition of will on the universe: imposition of will is neither the main problem with, nor the characteristic feature of, authoritarianism.

Just to review: In the US, even at the state-level, you elect officials to handle governance on your behalf. You typically elect an official to a lower legislative house, an upper legislative house, and a governor.

All 3 must cooperate in some fashion for legislation to become law, unless the state has a stipulation that a threshold of legislative members may override the governor.

As a resident you have say in each legislative chamber and for the state-level governor seat.

Now, it's the responsibility of a truly functional legislative body to respond to unpopular political objectives by determining if the electorate wants another solution or wants the issue dropped altogether. If the legislative body makes an error, one may vote out their representative via a party primary or via scheduled elections. If they have made a grave error, typically this can be resolved via the courts as a check.

While a carbon tax may very well be unpopular due to political will, a bill is proposing an alternative mechanism. This is a legislative body working as designed.

So no, this isn't authoritarianism.

This is hard to support if you study much history. Every environmental law has been criticized as authoritarian. In the middle of the previous century, Los Angeles had smog so bad it was common not to be able to see across the street and some conservatives argued that doing anything about it was tyranny and would devastate the economy; California’s air quality laws were so effective that they were widely copied and it devastated the economy into 5th place globally. Very few of the critics ever admitted being completely wrong about that, even if they will admit that it’s easier to breathe now.

That pattern repeats for water quality, bans on all kinds of pollutants, anti littering campaigns, etc. because there are a lot of industries which have a financial incentive in preserving the status quo. Often those pushes cut across industry lines, too: for example, a decade ago there was an astroturf campaign arguing that DDT restrictions were responsible for malaria deaths (based on people not knowing that evolved resistance was already a major problem in the 1950s), and that appeared to be funded not by the chemical industry but by the tobacco companies who were looking for attacks on public health agencies in Africa in response to successful anti smoking campaigns.