If we want to be carbon neutral in twenty years, poorer people need pretty strong incentives too. I don't see that working out if the carbon tax is mostly cost neutral for them.
They'll have a choice between two similar products. One is $10 because of a $5 carbon charge, the other is $6 with a $0 carbon charge. What will they choose?
They'll choose the $6 one, and keep their carbon tax dividend in their pocket too.
They won't really be worse off.
On the other hand, the rich will be worse off because they take more flights, consume more resources, and generally cause more carbon emissions anyway from their day-to-day lives.
Eh, many poor people don't have a choice when it comes to two their biggest carbon sources: transportation and heating. They're forced to use an old ICE to get to work, because biking and public transport is not practical for them, and they live in a rented apartment that is heated with oil or gas.
True, but we generally waste a lot of our emissions because fossil fuel energy is so cheap. People don't realize that you can save a ton of energy by, say, reducing the thermostat set point on your hot water heater, or putting plastic film over your windows and searching for and blocking drafts when it gets cold (or hot!) A lot of energy use is just habit that can be changed with very little cost, if the incentive is in place.
Granted, that won't get us to net zero, but there are a lot of high-impact, low investment changes we can all make.
Longer term, if fossil fuel energy places rise, I expect a lot more pressure put on local governments to make public transportation more accessible, and to remove legislation that blocks the building of walkable neighborhoods and cities. I'm convinced that the vast majority of driving we do is completely unnecessary, and is just the result of myopic laws about how we can build cities and suburbs that tend not to get challenged, which lead to us just building in a really dumb way that ensures everyone needs to drive.
Unless you are a factory putting out metric tons of CO2 I don't think the tax is going to be much to sneeze at for most people. Gas going up another 50 cents a gallon doesn't actually make that big of a dent to your pocket book at the end of the day, especially in cities where rent is already like $2000 a month for a single. If you fill up your car once a week, even if the tax at the pump was a full dollar, you are throwing down like $48 extra a month, or 2.4% your rent. Seems reasonable to me.
Investments into public transport and bike infrastructure is relatively cheap and improves streets for everyone.
Taking a car lane and/or parking and making a dedicated bus and bike lane out of it will reduce congestion and increase the mobility of nearly everyone.
Yes, I think the point still stands. A carbon tax is an efficient measure that will reduce emissions and not harm poor demographics.
However there are other things we can do as well to reduce emissions as well as increase life quality at the same time (improve public transport and bicycle infrastructure) where poor people benefit especially.
