The easiest, fastest, and most effective way to slow down the carbon emissions causing climate change is to put a price on carbon—to institute a carbon tax. Will we get one?

“An efficient climate policy would price carbon throughout the global economy so that users of all fossil fuels recognized their climate costs,” writes University of Chicago economist Michael Greenstone in the New York Times.

So will this big Paris climate conference get us a carbon tax?

The Wall Street Journal reports that even some of the world’s biggest oil companies have come out in support of a carbon tax (mainly because they think it will hurt coal and benefit their business, sure, but support is support.)

So will we get a carbon tax?

Alberta, the Canadian region that produces most of the country’s oil, has decided to institute its own carbon tax.

So will we get a carbon tax?

The World Bank and the IMF and the “leaders of France, Germany, Canada, Chile, Mexico and Ethiopia” all say that we need a global carbon tax.

So will we get a carbon tax?

A group including multiple Nobel Prize-winning economists and former US cabinet secretaries released a letter in advance of the climate summit calling for a carbon tax.

So will we get a carbon tax?

“A global carbon tax is unlikely to emerge from the U.N. climate summit.”

Ah, well. We can’t expect world leaders to do things just because they are plainly necessary.