Most people are concerned about climate change and want policymakers to address it. But how? To investigate which policy options are more versus less popular, with whom, and why, we collected data in four European countries on attitudes toward 16 policies: taxes, bans, regulations, and subsidies/spending. We argue that support for different policies should reflect perceptions of policies’ net costs, and that such perceptions are likely influenced by people’s political trust. We tested this expectation by randomly assigning survey respondents to read different versions of given policies and confirmed that individuals with low political trust, who are less supportive overall of most policies, are most sensitive to variation in implied costs. We argue this interaction effect is a previously untested implication of the influential theory that political trust operates as a heuristic, and it helps explain policies’ varying popularity, including the puzzle of why carbon taxes are highly unpopular.

One set of policies that have been suggested to address climate change are carbon prices. Pricing carbon makes it more expensive to make polluting or unsustainable choices and less expensive to make cleaner or sustainable choices. This article explains why, if well designed, carbon prices can provide systematic signals to the market and make societies fairer. The article also defends carbon prices from several objections.

The pursuit of measures to enhance the environmental sustainability of societies has shifted to become a core aspect of contemporary public policy. Taxation measures, intended to alter the behaviour of individuals and households, have become a central plank of many nations’ policy response. However, these initiatives arise alongside other taxation and redistributive policy objectives focused on equity.

The purpose of this article is to explore the taxation policy design challenges raised by attempts to pursue simultaneously environmental goals and traditional social policy objectives regarding social justice in line with sustainable development principles. Focusing on the experience of two liberal political economies with broadly similar tax structures but whose approach to carbon taxation has varied, Ireland and the UK, the article develops a social policy framework, inspired by the energy justice literature, to facilitate a holistic delineation of the social implications of carbon taxation in the two countries.

The paper compares the effects of market-based (M-B) and command-and-control (C&C) climate policies on the direction of technical change and the prevention of environmental disasters. Drawing on a model of endogenous growth and directed technical change, we show that M-B policies (carbon taxes and subsidies toward clean sectors) suffer from path dependence and exhibit bounded window of opportunities: delays in their implementation make them ineffective both in redirecting technical change, (i.e. triggering a transition toward clean energy) and in avoiding environmental catastrophes. On the contrary, we find that C&C interventions are favored by path dependence and guarantee policy effectiveness irrespectively of the timing of their introduction. As the hypothesis of path dependence in technological change has received vast empirical support and it is a key feature of many models of growth, we argue that C&C policies should be seen as a valuable and non-equivalent alternative to M-B interventions.