I actually made money on what has been misleadingly called the ‘carbon tax’. Specifically, I received more money in carbon pricing rebates than I paid in carbon pricing for energy purchases. This reflects, unsurprisingly, my values: I drive a hybrid car, I use a high-efficiency furnace, and I keep plastics in my home to a minimum.

Carbon pricing is often touted as the best and most efficient method to reduce carbon emissions, and the reduction of carbon emissions is necessary to prevent the sort of global climate change that will shorten billions of lives and make life for the rest of us more difficult and more expensive.

The idea of carbon pricing is to create a cost to carbon emissions. As it stands, without carbon pricing, the actual cost of producing carbon emissions is ‘externalized’ – that is, the people creating the emission do not pay the costs that the emission eventually creates. It’s like dumping your garbage outside your car; you are leaving the cost of picking it up and moving it to someone else.

I consider carbon pricing to be, at best, a compromise. If it wanted, government could simply declare carbon emissions illegal. There is precedent; the elimination of leaded gasoline was achieved through legislation, not through lead pricing. Similarly, the reduction of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons was achieved through legislation and international agreements, not pricing. Similarly, efforts to eliminate the pesticide DDT are proceeding through legislation, not pricing.

The use of carbon pricing to reduce carbon emissions is an effort to allow the marketplace to determine the best way to achieve these reductions rather than legislating solutions. It also allows those with the money to continue emissions while paying a price to those who are cutting back or, in the case of the developing world, never contributed very much to the total emissions at all. It this sense, it tries to import a degree of fairness into the system.

I think it’s impossible to deny that the rich – not only rich individuals but also rich corporations and rich societies – became rich at least in part because they were able to industrialize, and therefore, burn carbon at an unsustainable rate. There’s probably no real way to obtain compensation from the industrialists who burned coal in the 19th century, but we can demand compensation from those who continue to burn carbon today. We could just levy large taxes on their current financial holdings and allow only those from less industrialized countries to burn carbon. Carbon pricing is, in effect, a way to sort of allow the market to do this instead.

The problem – as everyone knows – with carbon pricing is that certain political parties (those most associated with the rich) have made it toxic by calling it a ‘carbon tax’ and by ignoring the payments made to people who are not, in fact, profiting by burning large volumes of carbon. Because, for the rich, that’s all it is. It’s the rich who are producing the most emissions, by a wide amount, and profiting from the worsening of the global environment.

I think most of us agree we need to reduce carbon emissions. Even if we personally will avoid this fate, most of use believe that it’s wrong to condemn our descendants to life in an environmental hellscape. It doesn’t much matter how we get there. If conservatives insist on making carbon pricing toxic, then fine; they can have their way. They should just not be surprised when other, more draconian, mechanisms are employed. Because sooner or later, the gravy train for the rich has to end.

I mean, it has to, right?