Carbon tax is a really nice and simple idea. But its key problem is that it costs the same whether or not there is a viable alternative for lowering carbon. So

Carbon tax is a really nice and simple idea. But its key problem is that it costs the same whether or not there is a viable alternative for lowering carbon. So it punishes industries for which there is no viable alternative using today’s technologies. And it also provides relatively low pressure to adopt the technologies we know are on the cusp of working. In theory in the long term it encourages innovation in all the right ways, but in practice there’s no way to usefully spend billions of dollars on pure research projects to fix the problems we don’t know how to fix yet. Targeted incentives and regulations, in contrast, can force industries to adapt quickly in ways that we know are actually not economically painful. (You just gotta enable low power mode on your laptops Dell, seriously it’s not hard just stop whining and do it.) Yeah it is a bit annoying, but it’s just annoying, no worse - not like putting a carbon tax on concrete which would be super expensive, basically impossible to avoid, and drag down economic growth everywhere.