For decades climate policies have been driven by the idea of pricing carbon emissions to change behavior. Despite this large spread orthodoxy, raising prices for fossil fuel or heating as a main tool has increasingly proven to be highly ineffective and hard to implement against massive social resistance, culminating in a crisis of Europe’s lighthouse emissions trading system ETS. Do climate policies need a new approach? A classical answer to this dilemma has been to design schemes that compensate people for rising costs. Newer approaches propose a more fundamental rethinking of climate policies with carbon pricing as only one instrument to be implemented in a more advanced stage of the transition. According to this modern approach, it is crucial to first heavily invest into low-carbon alternatives, and their infrastructure, e.g. charging for e-vehicles, and set strong positive incentives, like subsidies for renewables, so that households and businesses first get real choices before facing higher carbon prices. This session will discuss whether this fundamentally new approach is a key to save-guarding the principle of carbon pricing by creating affordable renewables and making climate action much more attractive. We will discuss how sequencing strong positive incentives before carbon pricing is central to also resolving the current crisis Europe’s former role model ETS – and how this can be put into practice, including by allowing EU Member States to ‘frontload’ future emissions trading revenues to implement positive incentives for low-carbon alternatives and invest in green infrastructure and markets first. We will discuss how sequencing strong positive incentives before and alongside carbon pricing is central to resolving the current crisis – and how this can be put into practice, including by allowing EU Member States to ‘frontload’ future emissions trading revenues to implement positive incentives for low-carbon alternatives and invest in green infrastructure and markets first.