That climate benefit from a carbon tax would only start indirectly helping the poor in decades, while a carbon tax is a direct immediate burden; and you can't j

That climate benefit from a carbon tax would only start indirectly helping the poor in decades, while a carbon tax is a direct immediate burden; and you can't just tell them to "take one for the team and wait it out" as that just ends up with them burning down your capital while wearing traffic vests. Using the carbon tax for regular infrastructure purposes is also a bad idea because when it is working it will go down overtime as the public optimizes their carbon use, as it should. Tying it to unrelated societal maintenance creates a pervasive incentive for the government to somehow force the continual use of carbon (probably through questionably legal means) while sustaining the tax in order to get income up. And all this also avoids the core issue in actually deciding if the unpaid externalize of a unit of carbon is $200, $20, or $0.02; if you can't even get people to universally agree if there is a crisis in the first place than how on earth are you going to get them to agree on the monetary value of said crisis.