Addressing climate change ultimately comes down to how we coordinate a transition to more expensive inputs to our production processes, so it will necessarily involve a *short term* decline in material living standards. How that decline is distributed is up to us.

Renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuel energy - if it wasn't, we would have already made the transition. Not only will we need to reallocate labor and materials from the latter to the former, we'll also need to reallocate them from producing other goods and services

There are a number of ways to force this reallocation. We can do carbon taxation, or mandates on utilities. Carbon pricing is often considered regressive, but it's not really much different than regulatory changes that force the use of more expensive renewables

Ultimately the distributional question doesn't come down to what method we use to force the change, but what method we use to subsidize the poor. A carbon dividend would leave the poor on average better off, utilities regulation could be paired with subsidies to keep prices flat

The dividend seems like the cleaner approach to me.

This is not to say that all climate policy is zero sum. Building denser cities is positive sum and an important step. And carbon taxes themselves don't have a huge impact on GDP (ranging from minorly negative/positive)

On the other side, we should pair climate policy with heavy taxes on the rich, to make sure that the goods and services that labor gets reallocated from to facilitate the transition are rich-people-things and not things that the poor rely on