[WillDaSilva]

Assuming the tax is high enough (or grows over time to become high enough) to offset the negative externalities, and that the money raised is used to offset negative externalities, they're better phrase not as "it's fine to burn up the world as long as you're rich", but rather as "it's fine to emit CO2 as long as you sufficiently offset the damage". Accounting for the damage could involve investments into green technologies, or paying ordinary people to make the tax popular, among other things.

Personally I like the idea of setting the price for emitting 1 ton of CO2 equivalent emissions to the realistic cost of capturing 1 ton of CO2. At least, that seems like a reasonable end goal for a carbon tax, since that could fully account for the negative externality. This would of course be obscenely expensive, which would be a strong incentive to lower carbon emissions where possible, and for people to consume less of products that require large emissions to make or use.

The carbon tax would also have to apply to imported goods to be effective, and tracking how much tax should apply to imports would be even more difficult than doing so for domestic sources of pollution.