I'm strongly in favor of a carbon tax, but the margins on airlines are already so thin that it's possible that increasing the costs significantly can make them unviable (barring some innovation in carbon-neutral transit, such as these airships). Specifically, a carbon tax could push ticket prices up so far that few can afford them, and since costs are amortized over many passengers, sharply reducing the number of passengers would further drive up the costs per passenger, in turn pushing ticket prices out of reach of even more people. It's possible that commercial air travel becomes altogether unviable such that air travel is only available to those who can afford private jets.
Of course, we wouldn't allow that to happen, so we would subsidize the airlines, which in turn defeats the purpose of the carbon taxes.
Now, you might say, "carbon taxes will drive the industry to find economical, carbon-neutral solutions", and surely it will provide this motivation, but motivation alone doesn't guarantee that such a solution exists or that we will find it in time.
If air travel pollutes too much, and the goal is to reduce air travel, how else do you want to regulate it except by price? By restricting the number of flights one may take, or have a government office where one can apply for flight permits? That has not worked too well, historically.
However, come to think of it, one might want to give everyone some carbon credit or travel points, and then develop a market in it. (That would still mean that the rich will fly as much as they want, but at least they'll pay the poor that don't travel for the privilege.)
> However, come to think of it, one might want to give everyone some carbon credit or travel points, and then develop a market in it.
This already exists, but the problem is that carbon credits are nearly impossible to regulate (it's very hard to prove that some carbon-reducing initiative isn't counted toward two distinct carbon credit programs or that the carbon is even reduced as promised). It's hard to do the accounting correctly for honest participants, which pretty much guarantees fraud among less honest participants.
There are two ways to price carbon from the government point of view.
One of them is a pure carbon tax on all carbon emitting sources, which is regressive: it will affect poorer people more while affluent people can just conveniently pay more to emit the CO2 they need.
The other way is by specifically increasing taxes on income and wealth and using that money to invest in decarbonisation - for the most part by making solar, wind (and in some cases nuclear) cheaper, which eventually makes carbon more expensive in relative terms.
Governments these days tend to focus on the second way, either because it's progressive and therefore perceived as fairer, or because they see the alternative as political suicide (Macron's Gillet Jaunes appeared because of a proposed carbon tax on petrol)
Yes, the price of high carbon goods and services would go up with a carbon tax.
The lower class is more susceptible to the effects of worsening air pollution and climate change. They see the greatest benefits in those categories as each are improved by a carbon tax.
The downsides for the lower class can be further ameliorated by making the tax redistributive, e.g. increased welfare benefits, lowering other taxes, UBI, etc.
It would go up yes, but probably not as much as you think. Carbon tax proposals generally range from $50-200/ton. The ICAO has a carbon emission estimating tool (https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/CarbonOffset/P...) that says emissions from a Seattle-Orlando round trip flight are are about 1350 lbs/pp. That makes that (fairly long) trip cost $34 to $135 more per person.
That’s significant, but a ticket already generally costs $387 to $400/pp in moderate travel months if you take a bag.
I'm not sure you realize how big the middle class is. Ideally, most air travel would be out of reach for most people and wealth would be fairly redistributed. This would however devastate economies heavily reliant on tourism and have a lot of other secondary effects, making it realistically impossible to do. There are no easy solutions here.
Of course, we wouldn't allow that to happen, so we would subsidize the airlines, which in turn defeats the purpose of the carbon taxes.
Now, you might say, "carbon taxes will drive the industry to find economical, carbon-neutral solutions", and surely it will provide this motivation, but motivation alone doesn't guarantee that such a solution exists or that we will find it in time.