Well... if you want lumber, minerals, metals, petrochemicals and food, then you too will need people living "in remote areas".

But people need to pay for the damage they inflict on the world. Nobody is so "special" or snowflake that they get exempted. Farmers are adults, they can be treated like any other adult in our society.

Sure, I suppose that could be priced into what they charge for their products. That may be a nontrivial challenge to work out, though, and it's possible they'll no longer be able to make a sustainable product after doing so.

Life is complicated and easy answers are often wrong.

Seems more like this kind of take is an attempt to canonize them.

They're economic actors. Their work is very important, but that's why they, you know, take money in exchange for their output.

Excusing externalities is how we get corporate structures where officers and shareholders are richly rewarded and tax payers get to pay for (and often live in) the SuperFund site after the company leaves.

I'm generally anti-carbon tax because it's the solution to the problem that is obvious, simple, and wrong. But when there are no other solutions, charging for cleanup is the way to go.

Farmers and miners pay for their costs. They can continue to do so and pass their costs on. Some farmers, at least in the US, we massively subsidize to a ridiculous extent in a make-work program for massive amounts of soy and corn. But this is an economic choice that is relatively recent in the history of the US, and we can decide at any moment to improve the efficiency of the economy by making externalized costs internal.

So a carbon tax on electricity generation sources works ok to incentivize a switch and internalize the externalities, but it's pretty equivalent to the general ITC/PTC subsidies that have recently been passed, with the exception that they are sector specific.

An economy wide carbon tax does almost nothing to incentivize decarbonization of steel or concrete, as the tech isn't there, nobody has spare money to invest in a solution, and the tax wouldn't necessarily increase the price of end products much. They need very specific industrial policy in these sectors to develop alternatives and put them into production.

Finally a carbon tax creates an entirely unified political coalition, across many sectors of the economy, to oppose the tax. So setting the tax at a level that is right to incentivize change is guaranteed to be nearly impossible, because od the breadth and political strength of the opposition to it. Specific carrots and sticks for each sector are what can drive real change in each sector.

If it was 1980, I'd be supporting a carbon tax. But we need to move far more quickly now to change our economic production systems than a carbon tax could ever conceivably achieve.

I can't think of a case where exempting some group from a carbon tax would be good policy. There is a pretty good argument though that a carbon tax would be regressive, and probably should be compensated for in some way so that poor people don't come out worse off, such as by reducing income tax in the lower brackets.

I think the hardest sector to decarbonize is going to be the military (with the exception of some small percentage of navy ships that are nuclear powered). I could see plug-in hybrid army vehicles eventually being a thing, though. Being able to run off of either diesel or electricity provides a lot of logistical flexibility. You can save the petroleum for when you really need to move long distances.

This is an easily solved problem. Just stop eating. Once you stop eating, then we don't have to have farmers and their remotely-located support communities growing food for you.

For bonus points, stop using computers. Electronics are made up of all kinds of metals that are mined in remote locations. So, stop using electricity at all, if you're really concerned about this.

And while you're at it, give up toilet paper. It comes from trees that are waaaay out in the forest. If you stop wiping, then we don't have to truck trees to paper mills to make toilet paper for people in the city to use.

Do your part.

  Sometimes population density is the defining concern,
  in other cases it is geographic isolation.  Small population
  size typically characterizes a rural place, but how small is
  rural? Population thresholds used to differentiate rural and
  urban communities range from 2,500 up to 50,000, depending on
  the definition.