A key Biden nominee to oversee automobile standards has spoken of strategies to make consumers "pay for the full costs" of behaviors that induce climate change.

Ann Carlson, the acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who was nominated by President Joe Biden to helm the agency permanently, has an extensive track record of championing environmentalist causes. In some of her prior research papers, she argued for realigning incentives against fossil fuel emissions by making things like driving cars more expensive.

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“I think our salvation relies not on the good will of individuals. Instead, governments and markets need to take steps to make us pay for the full costs of the behaviors in which we engage (a carbon price on energy usage is a good start),” Carlson wrote in a Legal Planet piece. "In other words, we need to be saved from ourselves."

The NHTSA is tasked with crafting regulations for automobiles with the state objective of curtailing "vehicle-related crashes" and saving lives. The agency has also sought to set ground rules on vehicle emissions, something Carlson has leaned into during her tenure at the agency.

“If driving is cheap, gas mileage doesn’t much matter to most people even with news of climate change, even in the face of calls for energy conservation, and even with the memory of high fuel prices just behind us. Behavioral change with respect to consumer car purchases won’t occur, in other words, out of the goodness of our hearts," she added in that Legal Planet piece.

Carlson is an environmental law scholar and worked as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles before Biden's team tapped her as NHTSA's chief counsel. She has worked as the acting administrator of NHTSA since last September.

"Safety is the top priority for NHTSA. During Ms. Carlson’s tenure at NHTSA, NHTSA oversaw 2,209 vehicle safety recalls affecting more than 68.8 million vehicles in the United States," a Department of Transportation official told the Washington Examiner ticking through her achievements in response to questions about her past remarks.

"This is the third straight quarterly decline in fatalities after seven consecutive quarters of increases, which started in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Further, the new CAFE standards NHTSA put forward will save people money with more efficient vehicles that save money at the pump," the spokesperson added.

Elsewhere, Carlson acknowledged the political pitfalls of cracking down on fossil fuels.

“But there’s one other big culprit in all of this. It’s all of us. Americans love their cars and their cheap gas and turn the other cheek to the environmental risks inevitable in the search for ever more oil," she wrote in a 2010 Legal Planet piece. "Support for taxing gasoline to get consumers to internalize the harms that fuel consumption creates is considered political suicide."

Much of Carlson's past commentary appears to be in lockstep with the Biden administration's agenda on climate change. Biden's team reached out to her in 2021 to serve in the NHTSA, and she wrote in an email she viewed that as emblematic of the president's "'whole of government' approach to addressing climate change," Fox Business reported.

Republicans have voiced misgivings about her nomination. Thirteen senators on the Commerce Committee penned a letter to her earlier this month expressing concerns that the Biden administration may follow in the footsteps of "California’s extreme push to ban gas-powered vehicles."

"Biden highway safety nominee Ann Carlson once praise 'scheme' to 'raise energy prices,'" Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), ranking member of the Commerce Committee, tweeted, sharing an article about Carlson's past remarks.

Carlson's past remarks were flagged to the Washington Examiner by watchdog the group American Accountability Foundation.

"Ann Carlson's authoritarian rhetoric and ideas are far beyond the pale of acceptable for an American government official. Americans believe in individual liberty, inalienable rights, and freedom from government coercion; clearly Ann Carlson believes in none of that. Her views seem to be more in line with the USSR than our Constitution," AAF president Tom Jones said in a statement.

In addition to ticking through strategies to address greenhouse gas emissions, Carlson also took note of other government campaigns to persuade consumers to be better stewards of the environment.

"In law and norms terminology, the persuasive techniques are meant to change individual cost-benefit calculations about whether to recycle by giving people added psychic benefit for doing the right thing (or added psychic pain for failing to recycle)," she wrote in a research paper from 2000.

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Biden has rolled out several climate change initiatives via executive order and congressional legislation, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, but so far appears to have largely eschewed more heavy-handed measures, such as a carbon price tax like Carlson floated in the past.

The Washington Examiner attempted to contact Carlson for comment.