> You can't fix everything with money. At some point, people are going to have to use vastly less resources, and simply making it more expensive is not the solution.
Your two ideas presented as facts, but they're opinions, and they seem heavily loaded with a particular vision of the world.
I'd say the opposite: Money drives everything better than other kinds of decisions, and raising taxes on polluting products is our only solution. Be it a carbon tax or emitting permits traded at the stock exchange, there are many forms, that's called internalizing the negative externalities.
Isn't 99% of worldwide procurement fixed with money? What matches a producer of coffee in Columbia with a consumer in Germany? Money. What ensures we pay thousands of researchers, engineers and technicians for years until we build those A380 planes in Toulouse? Money. Claiming it doesn't fix everything is getting blind to 99% of the world. I agree some people do some volunteering and that's out of the money economy - or is it? We've often demonstrated that volunteering biases the actions in favour of those who provide the volunteering, which can go from "Let's build wells in Africa" with a political impact in favour of EU, and as far as "Let's bring some freedom to Irak!". It doesn't remove any goodness from the people who donated their money and time, it just highlights that volunteering provides sometimes pleasure, sometimes pride, sometimes power to the one who provides it, and those aren't exactly orthogonal to money.
Claiming that something more expensive isn't the solution is another one. European cities are rather compact and people use public transports. Guess what, our petrol is 2x more expensive than in US because of taxes. I see nothing more efficient than adding tax on what pollutes the earth and removing taxes on what's neutral.
When I'm told by organic ecologists not to buy some sort of fish because they're brought over by plane from Angola, and they're cheaper than Atlantic ones, that's just too much info to process. If the fish from the close Atlantic is more expensive, it means we've spent more money for the fishing boat and the fishermen. Maybe the boat then consumes more petrol. Maybe the fishermen will buy bigger houses and 4wd cars. If the Angola fish is cheaper, maybe people are paid less, so there's an efficient use of all resources. So maybe the cheaper fish from Angola, after being brought over by plane, remains as less CO2-polluting than the one from closer Atlantic. Besides, as a consumer, given the uncertainity, I don't want to artificially choose the Atlantic one without being sure it consumes less CO2.
So, kerozen, gas, petrol, transport should be taxed proportionally to their polluting effect, so that the price of food, toys, hardware matches the amount of resources it takes to build them. Then only we can compare whether locally-produced products are better for the environment than long-distance ones, and whether a middle-class American family can really afford big houses in low-density residential area.
So, making it more expensive through tax sound like the solution to me.