[eduren]

>No, you'll just remove them from the economy without their consent, by introducing regulation to artificially lower supply

A few things:

1. Presumably any carbon tax would have to be secured and defended by our democratic institutions. Thus we would have consent (or as close as you can get to large scale consent in our multi-actor society). While I agree that regulating basic consumption for large swaths of the economy has a bit of an authoritarian bend to it, I'm not sure how else we incentivize ourselves to decrease consumption.

2. Lowered supply is not a given. Companies would be incentivized to find production chains, energy sources, and materials that had a lower impact (and thus a lower tax). Less impactful products would be able to price themselves under the high-impact products and satiate the demand.

EDIT Added 3. Consumption itself is not the enemy. The thing we want to minimize is negative externalities. It just so happens that under our current system, manipulating levels of consumption is the only lever our society has for affecting industrial emissions.