If you want to incentivize carbon capture you shouldn't focus on PLANTING trees (it's automatic - trees can plant themselves perfectly well without us).

The reason there are no trees somewhere is never "nobody planted them". It's either "somebody cut them and does something to prevent them growing back" or "the land isn't good for trees".

So planting the trees is never the solution. Buying farming land and reserving it for forest (that will grow by itself) is much more efficient.

>Carbon tax is the least bureaucratic and hardest to game mechanism.

Do you really think that in a world where every law is rife with carve outs and loopholes for specific industries, a world where states peddle liquor and gambling because sin taxes fund things they like, that a carbon tax would not be gamed? Of course not. The societal cohesion and political process to produce results that are not highly gamed, tilted or rigged simply does not exist, or at least it doesn't exist.

Your opinion that a carbon tax will "just work" in reality as it does in theory is predicated on sufficient amounts of ignorance that the distinction between ignorance and malice is no longer meaningful.

Exactly, that's why a carbon tax is so efficient. It's very simple, and there's a direct link between what is taxed and the desired output.

Everything is gamed, so you try and make your incentives as simple and direct as possible.

If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, you tax carbon emissions. Any other incentive is more indirect, less efficient and more gamable.

If you were king, I'm sure the carbon tax would be efficient, simple, and fair. But we live in representative democracies beset with special interests and ulterior motives, which means any carbon tax that our systems of government would actually end up implementing would not be efficient, simple, or fair.

No it won't be. But every other alternative to it would be worse.

I think you're underestimating just how badly a carbon tax could be implemented. If you don't account for the carbon emissions of e.g. imported goods, or carve out enough exceptions for specific influential special interests, you just end up accomplishing nothing other than regressively taxing the entire population.

The government is going to screw up anything they touch. So yes they'll screw up the carbon tax, but that's also an argument against any other measure they take to address the climate crisis. The carbon tax is more efficient than any other proposed measure, so you have to argue that they'll screw up the carbon tax more than they'll screw up the other stuff.

> you just end up accomplishing nothing other than regressively taxing the entire population.

Pick one. If it accomplishes nothing, it's not an effective tax either.

I posted at the top of this thread. Just want to clarify that I don't advocate for "incentives" like carbon credits or something, I advocate for government treating carbon removal as infrastructure, the way we build roads etc

That's how you end up with $20B NASA rockets that are inferior to $100M SpaceX rockets.