Last years have witnessed the rise of various citizen protest movements in the realm of environmental policy making. As highlighted by young people leading climate strikes around the world or the Yellow Vests in France, the rhetoric around global environmental issues such as climate change has involved a growing segment of the population. These new mobilization waves can lead to the dramatic failure of environmental policy as highlighted by the freezing of the French carbon tax after the yellow vests protest. In face of the urgency of implementing environmental policy to tackle with global environmental issues, it is crucial to understand how new citizens cleavages over environmental policy are formed and how they affect environmental policy choice.In this paper, we argue that a promising way to understand these new social divisions is to adopt a social identity perspective where people sense of self is tied to the social groups to which they belong. We develop a model of votes for a carbon tax in which identification is a choice which involves a trade-off between a perceived utility gain when one identifies with a group that enjoys high status and a loss from identifying with a group whose prototypical member is different from that person along relevant dimensions. Our theory provides a unified explanation for the formation of new opposition identities and citizen backlash against carbon taxes.