I understand that. It's the obvious reasoning behind a gas tax.
My entire point is that there are also other effects.
If gas prices raise significantly, then the price of everything - groceries, medication, clothing, cleaning supplies, solar panels, everything - raises, meaning simple things that everyone relies on suddenly become unaffordable to low-wage workers, so their employers suddenly need to raise profits to accommodate the price hike, and raise wages for the bulk of their employees, or (more likely) simply fail, resulting in a significant unemployment increase.
You can't just magically fix climate change by putting the poor out of work, nor should you.
> encourage more energy-efficient industries.
This can be done with much more reasonable methods. Don't forget that transportation is not the only significant source of carbon emissions. The best legislative efforts we can make are to support clean energy (nuclear, wind, solar).
If I can get that 17% function to run in 94% of the time, that is a greater gain from less effort than making any of those <1% functions run in 50% of the time.
The same principle applies to air pollution. Focus on the container ships burning bunker oil and the power plants burning coal first. Personal transportation using internal combustion engines is one of those 1% things, and even then, just taxing the gasoline won't help all that much.
As parent mentioned, it will also stifle the economic activity that could allow ordinary people to afford capital investments like at-home solar energy systems. And while one presumes that a "carbon tax" on gasoline fuel should be used to combat air pollution elsewhere, that is not necessarily how it will be spent.
British Columbia has a revenue-neutral carbon tax [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax
Especially in the US, where we are likely to raise the defense budget from $500 billion to $700 billion per year.
Makes me think about how much carbon is released for "defense".
Why? The purpose of the carbon tax is to capture the negative externality of carbon pollution, and to encourage more energy-efficient industries. Not all parts of the economy use equal amounts of energy, and we should encourage the energy-efficient ones.
I burn carbon when I drive my car to work. I burn much less carbon when I take the bus to work. We want to encourage the latter - carbon taxes let the market do this encouragement. The alternative is doing so by government fiat.