If everyone were consuming the same amount/causing the same amount of emissions, this would be a no-op. However, since the rich tend to consume more, this will be a net positive for poorer people, and at the same time it will make decisions about activity that causes emissions more meaningful.
It's also much more palatable than bans or rationing, reasonably easy to implement, and avoids the trap of populist "ban highly visible thing of the day" approaches that tend to lower quality of life without addressing the real issue.
Yes, billionaires with private jets tend to consume more but your average multimillionaire is probably working remote from a cushy white collar job while poor people need to commute to and from work (often long distances because rent is expensive). CO2 taxes are regressive however you try to sell them.
Second, even if it were true, you'd still have control over how you redistribute the revenue, and as a result, you can make the net effect as progressive as you want.
[1] https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
In practice billionaires wouldn't care how much you tax them unless you taxed a substantial portion of income, they'd still consume what they wanted. In order to materially change even middle class peoples' behavior prices need to change by double digit percentage points, and when you factor in that people don't spend all they earn, that's a lot of tax.
If there is a CO2-heavy option that's 10% cheaper than the "green" option, introducing the tax will suddenly make the "green" option the cheaper one.
This could be using an electric truck to get food to the store, it could be using a heat pump instead of an oil furnace, it could be the locally grown potatoes instead of potatoes that were trucked over a long distance from a place with cheaper labor, etc.
Most of the savings won't happen because the millionaire flies less, they will be made because someone, somewhere along the supply chain makes a different decision because the environmentally friendlier thing is now cheaper. That's the beauty of it - it's about fixing the emissions where the best effect can be achieved with the smallest investment, not about taking away people's ability to consume and live an enjoyable life.
Smaller processes that produce CO2 through actual emissions will probably fall through the gaps, but they're not critical in the big picture. Most will be covered through taxes on the fuel or energy. I'd expect most of the electric truck battery emissions to come from energy, either during the assembly of the cells or production of the ingredients.
> If you tax only direct emissions you motivate companies to amortize emissions by concentrating them during manufacture.
I do not understand. Indirect emissions are direct emissions at some point, and that's where they get taxed. The cost then gets passed along, creating an incentive to either buy from a supplier that can produce the same thing more cheaply by reducing emissions, or finding a substitute product that's cheaper because it's less emissions-intensive to make.
The real problem is imports from countries that do not follow an equivalent tax regime. I suppose here approximations will be necessary, and by making them overly generous, other countries have an incentive to join the scheme.
What if it's a giant shipping boat with thousands of containers?
The diesel fuel that the train company will buy has already been taxed at the refinery (if it's a diesel train). The gas that the power company will burn to generate power for an electric train has been taxed at import. The train company will simply pay the price of these goods, tax included, and pass this cost on to the owners of the goods being shipped. How is up to them.
Likewise, the "hidden" emissions from the production of the train are likewise "hidden" in its price: The steel that the train was made from was already taxed when it left the steel mill (not 100% familiar with steelmaking, but this may be one of the cases where it's insufficient to just tax the inputs since the steel mill might emit GHG that don't just come from fuel). The cost of the energy used in processing that steel already contained the cost of the emissions tax that was initially levied on the fuel. etc.
Firstly, what kind of excuse is this - imagine the same argument applied to social networks, should they just leave child porn on their websites because it too difficult to keep track of? What if a social network has billions of photos? Business has to follow the law, just like I do.
Secondly, we have armies of people collecting data on these containers and doing data science to manage and optimise supply chains, and they have the containers, their weights and contents documented for customs, to make sure they are safe and not overloaded, for insurance purposes, so they can be delivered to the right customer, many containers are independently GPS tagged, etc.
All this data already exists for every major carrier, haulage, etc. The hard part is like one guy delivering donuts part-time, but we don't need to go after that.
That electric car battery might be manufactured in China using coal power and shipped over the ocean in a diesel fueled ship and yet pay no tax, making an American-manufactured battery even less competitive.
Of course there is the question about people that simply _store_ carbon, e.g. what if there's a coal mine where the buyers of the coal don't actually use the coal for its energy purposes but instead for, say, makeup creation, or wood for building? We would probably have to work out special licensing for non-usage purposes and that's where it would probably get tricky.
Adding a tax on the carbon content of fuels will push that even harder.
There are no answers given usually, less so convincingly, mostly because the ones demanding scarcity are usually not the ones affected by it.
Just trying to find one member of the working class / blue collar amongst ExtencionRebllion and the like will be a tedious task. Not so much if you look for kids of millionaires, or of bilionaires. Or Millionaires and Billionaires themselves.
As of now I can only see two outcomes:
They either start making these scarcity demands a part of their foreign policy (meaning getting tough on the actual global polluters, not their domestic poor people who barely can afford one cheap vacation to the Balears per year).
Or we just start naming what we would have called it 150 years ago: A top-down class-war.
Meanwhile your "ExtinctionRebellion" phrase seems like a political touchstone that you assume other people know what you're talking about, but I have no clue what it is.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion_Youth
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Strike_for_Climate
Her Holyness [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
from 1968 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
and 1972 from that same club [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
and countless dystopian science-fiction literature and movies from that epoch.
edit: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=13
"We have all heard about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills."
SUBTLE