> If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs
You offset the carbon tax with a universal tax credit or refund or UBI or whatever you want to call it. Give people all of the money back that was generated from the carbon tax. Poor people don't fly on private jets or buy yachts so they'll come out ahead. Or at least, less behind than those who do spend money on those things.
You can put a blindfold on and throw lots of darts at the board, sure. I was specifically addressing the idea that economics somehow determines which CO2 producing activity is destroying the world and which isn't. CO2 is CO2.
I don't know what your first sentence means. A carbon tax puts into focus which carbon emissions are truly essential, and which ones are optional, expressed by the spending choices consumers make. If you have it in place and most voters agree with the principle (because they make money) then you move the tax rate slider up or down to get carbon emissions to whatever level is enough.
My first sentence means that UBI doesn't change anything to somehow make the offered definition of what kind of carbon pollution is destroying the world valid.
"Essential" doesn't mean anything to the physics of climate change, it just means something like "what people choose to do".
You offset the carbon tax with a universal tax credit or refund or UBI or whatever you want to call it. Give people all of the money back that was generated from the carbon tax. Poor people don't fly on private jets or buy yachts so they'll come out ahead. Or at least, less behind than those who do spend money on those things.