Morally shaming people into voluntary action doesn’t work. And the more attached people are to the things that they are being shamed into giving up, the less effective this strategy.
Environmentalists’ other strategy is government coercion to force polluters to cease and desist. But governments, especially democratic ones, don’t have carte blanche to inflict endless pain on their citizens without being booted out. That’s why Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme—under which each industry got a free carbon quota beyond which it had to buy offsets from less polluting companies with permits to spare—has shown pathetic results. Countries simply gamed the program to give their industries a reprieve. A global carbon tax, though in theory a less messy solution, has even less chance of ever being embraced for all kinds of reasons, including that poor countries will expect rich countries to impose a higher tax because they caused the problem in the first place, while rich countries will expect poor countries to shoulder more of the burden as they are currently the bigger polluters. (Given that many global warming warriors fancy themselves to be progressives fighting for the underdog, they should bear in mind that in this battle, might will prevail over right and poor countries will have to face the brunt.)
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