The gap between actual carbon prices and those required to achieve ambitious climate change mitigation could be closed by enhancing the public acceptability of carbon pricing through the appropriate use of the revenues raised. In this Perspective, we synthesize findings regarding the optimal use of carbon revenues from traditional economic analyses, and studies in behavioral and political science focused on public acceptability. We then compare real-world carbon pricing regimes with theoretical insights on distributional fairness, revenue salience, political trust, and policy stability. We argue that traditional economic lessons on efficiency and equity are subsidiary to the primary challenge of garnering greater political acceptability and make recommendations for enhancing political support through appropriate revenue uses under different economic and political circumstances.

Conventional approaches to mitigating climate change are not working. Despite the actions pledged under the 2015 Paris Agreement, actual progress is falling well short (1). Given limited time and resources, traditional efforts, such as the climate stabilization wedge approach, are unlikely to be effective on their own (2). Physical science has shown how complex adaptive systems can cross critical thresholds ("tipping points") (3), such that a relatively small change can trigger a larger change that becomes irreversible (4), and where nonlinear feedback effects act as amplifiers ( 5). We propose to examine how to exploit similar sensitive intervention points (SIPs) and amplification mechanisms in socioeconomic, technological, and political systems to advance climate change mitigation. We focus on research and policies in which an intervention kicks or shifts the system so that the initial change is amplified by feedback effects that deliver outsized impact.