"It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it." Just the opposite, it's hard to find any rationality for doing it at all. If a 'carbon tax' is really

"It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it." Just the opposite, it's hard to find any rationality for doing it at all. If a 'carbon tax' is really just going towards reducing carbon, but not going into R&D for carbon reducing technologies, then it's probably just as efficient to simply limit carbon use in a variety of areas. Taking vast amounts of money from businesses is an indirect way to stimulate R&D on such things. The simultaneous effect of severely limiting productivity, with a gigantic wealth transfer to those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, would be a 'double inflation whammy'. A more extreme version would be: "No more cars or busses, and by the way, we're now going to grab your wealth and transfer it over to those people over there" It's best to consider them as separate activities. Solve the climate problem with effective technology and regulation, solve inequality by getting people into the workplace and by helping to more evenly distribute surpluses. In particular, low interest rates are causing massive inequality in wealth due to home appreciation, which is absurd.