Well, making necessities more expensive is difficult to sell no matter how it’s packaged. Like it or not, oil is used in everything from transporting food, to growing food, to medicine and supplements, to commuting for work, to home insulation and building, to iPhones and computers. Making those things more expensive, no matter the righteousness of the intention, hurts especially the working classes and the poor. Targeted subsidies to compensate them for their loss is impossible to fairly calibrate, and usually results in even greater political turmoil.

Carbon taxes can work if the country is wealthy and can afford the productivity loss (and the citizens are willing to give up that economic progress and wealth). For a nation like the UK, with massive economic problems, a growing underclass, astronomically high housing costs, and spiraling costs for necessities like food, a carbon tax is nothing other than a direct attack on the poor and political suicide.