[tfehring]

In fact, various US government programs use taxpayer money to shield parts of the population from negative consequences of climate change already. For example, FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program subsidize property owners in high-flood-risk areas and pass along the immediate economic cost of rising sea levels to everyone else. Fannie and Freddie do the same thing by maintaining lax flood insurance requirements and taking losses (at the margin) when uninsured homeowners end up underwater (figuratively and literally) and walk away.

I do think a revenue-neutral carbon tax as described in [0] could be politically viable in the not-so-distant future. But maybe I'm being too optimistic on that - coal miners seem to be awfully overrepresented in the current political environment.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/28/196355493/econ...