I agree completely. It is much easier to directly capture the externalities at the most centralized and traceable point (production/refining, and importing) tha

I agree completely. It is much easier to directly capture the externalities at the most centralized and traceable point (production/refining, and importing) than to have a decentralized system of varying standards and shadiness. If you tax carbon at the source there is no nuance and it’s much harder to cheat. The problem does become partly a tragedy of the commons though. If eg China doesn’t tax carbon at all internally, then we’d need to figure out how to appropriately tax the emissions of imported finished goods so as not to incentivize them to release CO2 as a competitive advantage. Even if we do that, they may still trade with another country that doesn’t tax imported goods either. One benefit for carbon offsets is they can in theory be used to incentivize cross-border emissions reductions without requiring the poorer countries to sacrifice anything.