For years, U.S. politicians have debated whether to impose a price on carbon. The time may finally have come.

That might seem hard for most people to fathom, given the yearslong, seemingly intractable political deadlock on the issue in the U.S.

But I believe we’ve reached a tipping point, where a tax on carbon emissions or some other price for emitting the gas is close to inevitable.

What has changed?

For one thing, the economic rationale for a carbon price is stronger than it ever has been. At the same time, technological advances have made it much cheaper to move away from carbon-emitting technologies, making a carbon price less punitive than it would have been in the past. Meanwhile, one of our biggest global rivals, China, is about to impose a carbon-pricing plan, meaning that the U.S. may not be at a competitive disadvantage if it institutes a similar program.