I agree that reducing emissions is about will, but I'm frightened that we seem not especially willful. And that does seem like a matter of culture, which could be changed. We just don't have a robust framework for deliberately creating those changes. We gave a portfolio of expensive one-offs.
I think we're talking about different things. Yes, I agree that a carbon tax is needed, and would change individual behavior. But as you say, the biggest hurdle is will, which we have been sorely lacking. I'm talking about, how can we change what people _want_, which would include as a consequence creating the political will which allows us to take such decisive action.
So far, lots of places have not chosen to implement any carbon tax because they value the environment less than their present access to goods and services to which they are accustomed. And even the carbon taxes which have been put in place don't actually address the real externalities of emissions, suggesting that even if the polity there values the environment _some_, it's still less valuable than buying cheap stuff.
EU carbon taxes vary wildly between countries, from €0.07 in Poland to €116 in Sweden. Sweden's tax is at the very low end of recommendations from a 2018 UN report, which gave the extremely broad range of $135 to $5,500 per ton. And only now is there a _proposal_ for an EU border tax to account for emissions in goods entering the EU. So even in Sweden, where perhaps cultural values made a comparatively high rate politically feasible, no one has yet paid a carbon tax which actually addresses the externalities of emissions, because of imports.
My original comment mentioned Tesla as an example of how to get people to actually want the greener goods more than their alternatives. People that really wanted a Tesla wanted it more than any ICE car. They still wanted it after Tesla hit the tax break cap in the US. They perceived a Tesla as smart, glamorous, futuristic, and conveying status. This is qualitatively different than someone who lives in a place with a carbon tax who can be convinced to take a train trip rather than a regional flight, or buys a home which is better sealed and will be cheaper to heat/cool.
I would claim that aside from typical corporate marketing activities which center around a given product or brand (which is what I was thinking of when I referred to a "portfolio of expensive one-offs"), the other primary precedents for getting people to want differently have been religious evangelism and state propaganda, neither of which ever yielded an engineering discipline of predictable, well-understood mechanisms.
