Tl;dr: It isn’t a system to “inform one of the behavior one needs to change most urgently” as the author puts it. It’s a transfer of wealth from the economies that impose it to the economies that find a way to leverage the arbitrage.
Going green doesn’t need to be a punitive process, Infact, all indications from our efforts over the past decade indicate that punitive measures are far from perfect. The incentive for solar and wind energy, for example, has saddled places like Germany and California with systems that dont scale with growing demand, leading to temporary large burns of dirty coal or arguably worse, cutting off power to whole cities for hours.
Intelligent societies solve problems through innovation. A billion dollars to five or so independent contractors to set up efficient modular nuclear reactors with some entity like the Army Corps of Engineers or experts from the energy department assisting with oversight and safety would completely change the game over night.
You can still fly to meet your family and cities can run public infrastructure around the clock carbon free for any demand load we can imagine for the next century.
The issue is precisely the idiots who come up with the ideas of a carbon tax. Bureaucrats. Won’t be around by the time the idea fails so the blame falls to someone else.
The legal and regulatory barriers holding nuclear back in the US right now is one of the gravest mistakes of the coming century.