Can you think of any examples when governments stimulated major (not minor) shifts purely with price incentives? Harrison´s marine chronometer (designed for a very large prize), perhaps, but it was a narrow innovation.

Above (1) would be $10 end of 82, then raise $20/year, so $110 end of 87, then $40/year, $240 end 1990, $400 1994. Spread the money 3/4 per person refund. 1/4 on public space eff, public transportation etc.

Now that means that everyone know that the cost of fossil fuel is going to raise over that 14 years. And the “market signal” is very strong. And could have produced a much larger CO2 reduction than what happened.

But we will never know. And of course governments don’t work logically when run by existing PTB.
In general the “market signal” are to weak and masked by government support old industries.

After all, we need electric vehicles, solar panels and windmills. There cannot be sustainable economic growth without them, because the rising third world needs lot more energy than what can be saved.

There is additional worry. We may need to suck out the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere according the recent IPCC report. And only sustainable way to suck out carbon dioxide is to transform as much agriculture into old growth forests as possible. European old growth forests e.g. can be carbon sinks for more than 800 years, but this is only possible if we substitute some horizontal agriculture with energy intensive vertical greenhouse agriculture. And most of the Earth bulk crops should be cultivated in grass lands or deserts where forests do not naturally grow.

As temperate forests are best in absorbing carbon dioxide this means in practice that Europeans must get rid off agricultural subsidies and instead we must buy bulk food from African countries and direct development aid into investments on irrigation projects. In Africa there is plenty of rivers for irrigation, but also solar power for creating fresh water from see water.

This way we can fulfill three important goals:

(1) We can efficiently combat global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

(2) We can efficiently combat desertification with irrigation and planting of trees.

(3) We can efficiently combat deterioration of natural ecosystems and protect old growth forests.

(4) We can help to fight global poverty if the rich European countries buy food from the poor Africans. Today Americans and Europeans are instead exporting surplus subsidized food into Africa that is harmful for the local food production and does not create sustainable revenue for the third world countries.

Carbon markets work in the short term: promoting efficiency, closing down the worst coal plants tomorrow, that sort of thing. But the energy transition requires alternative zero-carbon technologies, and the sunsetting of even optimally efficient fossil fuel uses like natural gas plants and modern European ICE cars.

The development of zero-carbon technologies is initially much, much more expensive than efficiency gains. Somebody had to pay for getting the cost of solar cells down a hundred-fold from $77/watt to 77c/watt. It was first American, then Japanese taxpayers, and finally German consumers. The long-tem legacy liability to the last group ha sben cited(by opponents) as $130 bn, it´scertainly very large. But there was no cheap way to do it. And nowehave a (crude and bumpy) roadmap to a sustainable future.