A rebate was a key part of getting Canada's recent carbon tax through parliament. The standard arguments against pricing carbon are "it'll kill jobs", "it'll kill industry" or "it's just another tax on hard-working families". I think that any effective green policy agenda has to have a lot of direct and obvious quid-pro-quos to address these concerns. It's not ideal in a narrowly rational sense, but it's politically expedient.

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...