Comment by Yizahi

My issue with carbon tax is that emissions happen anyway and in the same amount, they are just taxed afterwards. The only way for tax to make a dent in emissions is to tax something so thoroughly that businesses would close or partially close some production lines.

It's like taxing drugs more and more, we have already done this, taxing nicotine. It really didn't work until governments started banning some products across the globe. Before that it was just as deadly as usual, but more expensive with each new tax hike. And that is a luxury product, non essential one.

Taxing emissions too much to actually make a difference would mean taxing business so much that some low marginal ones would go bankrupt. And among those low marginal emitting businesses I'm pretty sure are a lot of truly essential ones, which we can afford to just rapidly close with no recourse. So they won;t be taxed as much or alternatively they will be subsidized after being taxed (yay, double the paperwork and double the options for corruption). And so emissions will stay around the same order of magnitude.

I would silently accept existence of the credits and taxes even if they were pointless, if in parallel governments had acknowledged and implemented actual research and later action to really combat climate change (DAC tech, sun shields, sulphur seeding etc.) at scale (important). But no luck :(