“Gernot Wagner, an economist at NYU, was more sanguine about the results. “There are people out there who are convinced their policy design is the answer, and, look, it never is,” he told me. “At the end of the day, it’s all politics. And it’s all identity politics, which is not what we’d like to be the case, but it is.”
In his native Austria, he said, the government just implemented a carbon-tax-and-dividend scheme, along with a slew of business-friendly tax cuts and a national public-transit subsidy. “The whole package is what’s going to make the difference,” he said. More than 20 years passed between the first carbon-tax proposal in Austria, he noted, and the specific combination of policies and coalitions that made it possible.
Quotes in: “Not Even Free Money Can Fix a Carbon Tax” by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 26 January 2022.
For context: “Great piece, alternative title: ‘Policy can’t fix politics’” (Twitter thread)