Okay, I think I understand your idea - essentially to impose nonlinear costs to consumption of "carbon-heavy" goods and services, so that someone who flies 10xN

Okay, I think I understand your idea - essentially to impose nonlinear costs to consumption of "carbon-heavy" goods and services, so that someone who flies 10xN miles pays much more than 10x of tax. It would be interesting and useful if it worked, however, I'm sceptical of this working - in essence, while "linear" taxes can be relatively easily (there still are difficulties, especially internationally) levied at any point e.g. manufacture, import, sale or use, anonymously, no matter who or how consumes the product. However, having such a "nonlinear" tax is quite hard to administer effectively since it requires taxing at the point of use, tracking all points of sale to the specific individuals, aggregating them (if the person flies N miles per year from many different companies), and preventing transfers of that thing between people and/or using proxies. I don't think that I have seen nonlinear consumption taxes implemented in practice anywhere; the largest nonlinearity I have seen is exemptions where some ways of circumventing the tax are explicitly permitted for small, limited quantities. For core aspects of carbon emissions - namely, emissions from burning fossil fuels either in cars or heating homes - that would essentially require individual registration of fuel purchases; IMHO that would be treated as quite invasive; for the airline example you mention, this would require shifting the airline pricing so that the price is dependent on which person will be flying (beyond mere name, since names are not unique), which would be a major change in all the process of how airline tickets are booked worldwide.