If you're a suburban citizen/voter who relies on a car to get to work/stores/school and on hydrocarbons for home-heating in the winter, the immediate impact of a carbon tax (without mitigatory measures) is to increase your expenses. That generally leads to reduced living standards.

I agree that properly pricing carbon emissions is essential, but one should not overlook the short-term impact. I remember the original Kyoto agreement, which seemed impossible at the time; in hindsight, the negotiators could have done us greater good by adopting a quantitative pathway that even the developing countries agreed was possible. Beginning to price carbon emissions, even a little, will have real impact.

The most thermodynamically-efficient way to deal with carbon in the atmosphere is to keep it in the ground. Furthermore, when we burn hydrocarbons and sequester CO_2, we remove oxygen from our atmosphere.

>We do have an option to make it more expensive to pollute until we figure that out

I'm saying that option only exists on paper because invoking it in any capacity that actually imposes enough cost to make people reduce polluting by a meaningful amount is going to met with too big a backlash to be sustainable.

>Why do you directly relate carbon taxes to a reduction in living standards??

Because anything that raises cost across all goods and at every step of every supply chain reduces living standards because people will simply be able to afford less goods and services at their new prices. That people will have to do things like turn down the A/C and eat out less in order to make ends meet. Individually those aren't big deals but they have follow on effects, the HVAC guy and the restaurant get less business. Those apply through the entire economy compounding the problem. There are also a lot of people who are going to be pushed over standard of living "cliffs" so to speak. The increased cost will be the difference between living in an air conditioned apartment or not. You apply the former type of changes across the entire economy you'll piss everyone off. You sprinkle in the latter and you've got a regime change on your hands. The only way an across the board standard of living decrease like that is tolerated is when it is overwhelmingly consensual (see WW2 mobilization).

I agree we need to do something but what? It's a real shit situation. Doing nothing is bad. Doing a token "something" doesn't help. Doing something that actually helps is not sustainable. Either climate change has to get worse or solving it has to get cheaper before we as a society can (uncontroversial) justify the level of resource allocation that will be required to make a meaningful difference.

Agree with you completely. A simplistic way of pointing this out is that EVERY tax and every cost regressively effects the poor more. If you are close to break-even, or you have negative surplus already, then additional cost is always worse for those who are worse off.

The alternative is to levy large taxes on corporations who pollute, that come only after payroll expense. Then, you could create a progressive deduction where pollution taxes were zero for low income earners, while after some threshold everyone was taxed for polluting.

It's unsatisfactory because the government hates earmarking specific income for specific outcomes and they much prefer the slush fund approach (for not entirely bad reasons). But, if pollution taxes specifically were spent on buying CO2 sequestration products which were deemed effective by the NSF or some other group, we might be able to create a non-regressive pollution tax to increase the net cost of polluting.

Because a certain type uses it as a code-phrase for "smaller cars, condos and fake cheeseburgers". They feel a deep sense of revolt at the affront of that personally, but are smart enough to realize they'll come off like the disgustingly amoral (imho evil) person they are if they complain about it personally. So they project it as a vague "standard of living" across poor/global-south people as a way of concern trolling libs into not taking their truck.