Why Carbon Taxes Failed

Governments hoped a single price signal would spare them the hard work of planning. Daniel Driscoll argues that this hope is why carbon taxes, for decades the favoured global strategy for decarbonisation, so often ended in political spectacle: tear gas on the streets of Paris, proposals left to gather dust in government archives. Drawing on archival research and conversations with policymakers and activists, he sets out a framework linking a tax's fate to a nation's economic engine. Carbon taxes work, he contends, only when they fit existing growth strategies and when governments have already secured replacements for fossil fuels in critical sectors.

Where they penalise powerful growth coalitions without offering green alternatives, conflict, inequity and abandonment follow. A clear, unsentimental argument for anyone who suspects climate policy is less a market puzzle than a matter of political economy still waiting to be built.