Making emitting CO2 more expensive leads directly to releasing less CO2 for a given standard of living. If you 10x the cost of coal, that's not going to 10x the

Making emitting CO2 more expensive leads directly to releasing less CO2 for a given standard of living. If you 10x the cost of coal, that's not going to 10x the cost of electricity, people are just going to switch over to a different energy source. Likewise for large scale industrial processes and transportation. Further, most technologies that reduce CO2 emmissions do so by being more efficient, which reduces long term costs and leads to better productivity. The creation and installation of these replacements creates high paying jobs and stimulates the economy. Incentivising the adoption of these technologies allows them to be produced at larger scales which in turn drops their price, leading to wider scale adoption. Preventing catastrophic climate change of course has its own immense benefits to standards of living. Indeed, a high tax due to a high cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere creates an enormous incentive for those who can not abandon their polluting methods to invest in the developments of better sequestering technologies. Waiting for the technology to just magically appear as a prerequisite for incentivizing its deployment is dumb.