[skookumchuck]

Taxing pollution, instead of taxing productive activity, is a quality tax. Instead of spending money to combat pollution, people are incentivized to find solutions. Instead of punishing productive people to get government money, polluters are punished.

[tomatotomato37]

Pollution taxes can only work for post-industrial countries that are able to run on mostly service industry and import everything that requires manufacturing. As thus, they would be fine for most European countries but crappy for industrializing countries like India.

[zozbot123]

Even in a developing country like India or China, a pollution tax would be an effective (and lucrative) defense against opportunistic "race to the bottom" behavior. There are plenty of emerging industries, even in manufacturing, that don't depend on polluting the environment for their viability.

[akimball]

And the ones that do need to pay the cost of their actions. Taxing pollution means society can control the incentive tipping point to optimize cost-benefit.