Carbon Tax/Cap-and-Trade

There is a lot of talk these days about the need for a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Two proposed ways of doing this are the carbon tax and the cap-and-trade system. While both are ways to go about drastically reducing emissions, the differences between them are very important to understand.
The basic idea of a carbon tax is to put a tax on energy, forcing people to pay for their carbon emissions. In the system, the price is higher for forms of energy that are more polluting, so there are insentives to both use less energy, as well as increase use of non-polluting renewable energy.
The cap-and-trade system is a little more complicated. Basically, limits are on the amount of carbon that that be emitted, and if someone goes over the limit, then they have to buy more credits from someone who pollutes under the limit (if one pollutes under the limit, they can sell the difference).
Different sides have different advantages, and while one isn't clearly better than the other, economists think that a carbon tax would be better suited in implementation, and would be less likely to be manipulated. A carbon tax puts the pain on the consumers, so they must chose to reduce their energy consumption or pay the price themselves. If people reduce the energy used, and polluting forms of energy are too expensive, then we will see society emitting a lot less carbon. Not all people may understand the extreme and immediate danger of the climate crisis we now find ourselves in, but everyone seems to understand dollar signs.