How would America vastly reduce CO2 emissions to achieve parity with the UK? Who do we hurt first?
Get rid of coal. Take some of the ~$6bn/yr that you currently spend subsidising the fossil fuel industries and deliver a package of job-creating tax credits in Wyoming and West Virginia.
Do whatever it takes to remove minimum lot sizes, single-use zoning and minimum parking requirements from zoning laws. I'm sure that the Supreme Court could be persuaded to change their mind on Euclid vs Ambler. Maybe people would drive less and walk more if suburbs weren't legally required to be unwalkable.
Reallocate some of the ~$20bn/yr you spend on agricultural subsidies to disincentivise cattle feedlot operations and incentivise soil sequestration.
Impose gradually escalating taxes on road and domestic aviation fuel and spend the revenues on mass transit infrastructure. Offer low-income citizens a rebate.
Seriously, I agree with your end goal in the reduction of man-made CO2 emissions. I even agree, in spirit, with items 3 and 4 above. What I don't agree with is the sudden dismantling of industries and punitive taxation.
I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve. I also believe that the Earths weather operates wholly independently of man's industrial activity at this time.
Plenty of other countries have already done it. There's literally nothing stopping Americans from following suit if Americans decide that it's the right thing to do.
>I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve.
If the IPCC are right, that'll be far too late. They say we need ambitious action now. They could be wrong, but is that a gamble we want to take? Is it worth risking a disaster-movie scenario so that we can keep driving big trucks and prop up some industries with no future anyway? If the IPCC are right and we do nothing, how will we explain it to our grandchildren? "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we thought that 99.9% of scientists were wrong?". "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we couldn't be bothered getting the bus?". Is that how we want to be remembered?
All the other ideas are fantastic.
Some climate-related policies are going to be inherently painful, so we should seek wherever possible to mitigate that pain, spread it around equitably or ration it out over time. Getting people to transition to more sustainable lifestyles is obviously the goal, but uprooting a bunch of low-income workers has terrible optics and burns political capital that could be better used elsewhere. You're aiming for diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.
The calculus is slightly weird in the US due to what I will politely describe as a unique political culture, but you can frame a lot of it in American political grammar. Call it the "war on weather" or something, appeal to the self-image of America as the world's moral leadership, sell it as every citizen's patriotic duty and use the term "common sense" a lot. Emphasise how it'll build a long-term economic advantage over China. If you think immigration is bad now, just wait until half of South America becomes uninhabitable. If we pass this R&D bill, we'll have a monopoly on this technology in the future. Green policies are eminently achievable in the US political landscape, but they need to be thoroughly decoupled from liberal rhetoric.
https://globalnews.ca/news/5202108/carbon-tax-canada-2019-re...
Fuel taxes are pretty high already. Increasing them will hurt a lot of people very badly.
It's actually becoming a problem; our fuel taxes haven't risen as much as inflation, and our road infrastructure is funded largely by fuel taxes.